That article has it wrong. The same thing that is happening with other churches is happening with the LDS church. You have to understand that they put MASSIVE emphasis on growth, converting new members, and having large families -- much, much more than other churches. All young men spend two whole years on a mission just trying to convert people. And yet, despite that, their growth rates have fallen off drastically and they're now in stasis, birth rates are falling, and they're keeping less than half of their members born after 1980 (it used be they kept 75%). The LDS Church does whatever it can to cover this up for PR, but the fact is, they're treading water mostly on converting poor people from undeveloped countries and riding off the fact that birth rates are still higher than the rest of the US (but plunging within the LDS community). They're losing young members rapidly just like all other churches, with the generations who grew up in the internet era. https://religionnews.com/2019/03/27/how-many-millennials-are-really-leaving-the-lds-church/
I'm sorry to hear that life sucks for you. For me it's pretty great, so I'm happy to give that gift to a few new people, made out of the DNA of my two favourite people.
Wage slave I take it is not an accepted term in the US? That culture seem to glorify working all the time. I've heard people going to doctors or therapists and then jump you like a shark if one admits one is currently unemployed. It's horrific and inhumane.
Actually, is this true? I think only a really tiny number of people will have children who don't earn $30,000 in their lifetime, and if you're earning money, aren't you contributing to the world (as per the market's best ability to assess).
Perhaps since you're getting the $30,000 that compensates you for your contribution and leaves you neutral, but surely laborers in most industries don't capture all of the value they create.
Great points. Let’s assume one in a million kids might have the intellect to graduate college and help develop some technology that would really move the needle on climate change. 140 of those kids are born worldwide every year. I would suggest the more of them born in the first world, the better the chance they will graduate and develop the answers we all need. Rationally, if it’s answers we want, western parents should be upping their game
Truly so. The real catastrophe as of 2100 is more likely to be of the people of the future looking back and feeling bad for us for existing in less well off circumstances than them and experiencing disproportionate climate dread on top of it
There are two simple numbers for this. World GDP is projected to grow by 450% by 2100. The mainstream projection for climate costs by then will result in a world merely 434% better off. Furthermore the projections are that developing countries will catch up substantially - the statement "climate change will hit subsistence farmers hard" is reasonable, yet the average person in a low income country will have experienced a large scale wealth increase. Based on this I would expect the correct statement about subsistence farmers would be to say that fewer of them will rise above certain poverty levels than otherwise would have while a smaller number will experience severe hardship, assuming their newly better off nations choose to do nothing about it
There are three main climate economic dynamic modeling systems and none of them project a "business as usual" climate cost of 5% of GDP in 2100, so take that as the warming cost to the economy in 2100. This extreme vs extreme scenario results in a world 95% richer per capita in 2100
What about extreme vs extreme², a real catastrophe? I believe these events are up in the 95th percentile of scenarios - for example this is the range of likelihood of RPC 8.5, the "business as usual" emissions scenario that roughly projects a new coal plant to be build every day from now to 2100
But it's not just that. If a catastrophic level event started happening such as methane release from the arctic you would also have to factor in the likelihood of us doing nothing about it. And there is a proven solution to a major situation in the form of volcanic aerosols documented to have a global cooling effect. Even at a low social cost of carbon the benefit to cost ratio of firing sulphur dioxide into the stratosphere with naval artillery is 20-1 - not considering the costs of reducing sunlight. Thus the true cost of a catastrophe has a hard cap according to how plant growth and solar panels were affected by this particular edge case. There also appears to be an eminently achievable edge case geoengineering technology in marine cloud brightening with sea water aerosol, at far less direct cost than the sulphur dioxide and a far less further cost as the main sunlight blocking would be over the oceans
Not only do you need an extreme case vs extreme case² outcome for anything to happen that can be actually called catastrophic, there is yet another factor where a 95th percentile climate costs scenario presumably has something like a 95% chance of being met with a backstop geoengineering project
"No one" is a strong claim, and given that eg ethical vegetarians definitely exist, it sure seems like people are willing to make extremely big and difficult life changes to stand up for their environmental views. I agree we should sometimes be cynical about people's real motives, but I have also seen a lot of people get burned by totally failing to believe that other people can possibly believe what they claim to believe.
I think it's fair to presume that in all (lol) cases where people use words like 'all' and 'no one' they are saying 'materially all/none' because it gets awkward typing that out all the time just like he/she and similar.
Fair enough but I felt like Scott was glomming onto it in a sort of unfair way. It may still be false but I am receptive to the concept that people need to justify why they don't have children. And I that in the non-judgmental way of seeing it from the perspective of fellow executives who were childless and the questions raised on semi-regular bases.
I have to ask: why could somebody have to justify NOT having children?
When I'm dealing with somebody I disagree with, I can usually at least understand the reasons for their position, and very often I can emphathize, even see myself sharing their vewpoint if I weighted things differently.
On this one, I seriously have any problem even generating possible reasons to think that, and the best ones I can come up with seem totally crazy to me, either on their face or if I follow their implications one step further out.
It bothers me to not even be able to comphrehend the other person's view.
From the collectivist point of view, raising the next generation is something that has to be done in order to avoid social collapse, and therefore if you can (and an executive presumably has the money to) you should.
From an instinctive point of view, having kids is something most people do and want to do and so if you don't do it when you clearly can you might be [a sociopath/a radical/a pod person/otherwise Bad News]. Not having kids is more likely to draw accusations of sociopathy than normal, since raising kids is seen as altruistic (and the rate of sociopathy among CEOs is far higher than normal, so it's a more-believable claim).
Not saying I agree with either of these (I'm sympathetic to the first one, but I think the Soviet solution of childlessness tax is more efficient), and the second one is perhaps uncharitable, but I'm reasonably sure those are thought processes that get used.
One perspective is the aspect of social ("tribal"?) cohesion based on the presumption that your close community generally shares the same values/principles/social norms/etc, and you can expect that others will do as you expect (predictability is very useful) because they (by default) share your views.
So, whenever someone asserts that they won't do as most others would, the request for justification is obvious from this perspective. if you diverge from social norms because you want different things or have different values, that becomes a bit alarming - so perhaps we shouldn't rely on you following all the other social norms as well? Then the "tribe" has to treat you as a "mental foreigner" and analyze your motives instead of doing the simple way and assuming that you're essentially the same as everyone else. But If there's an objective reason where the other person, if they were in your shoes, would also act the same way, that's socially acceptable and passes "tribal allegiance" test, because it doesn't imply that you would be divergent for any other social norms and values.
TL;DR - people ask you to justify unusual decisions because they signal a potential misalignment of personal values, and a justification is a way to verify/reassert an alignment of values.
I don't think here of all places is a bad place to ask people to not use hyperbole. And of all people to ask it, our host is likely one of the best people to ask it.
I suppose you could say it would also be appropriate to steelman their argument and actually respond to the argument you think they are making instead of the argument they are actually stating. However, that runs both into the problem that Scott points out AND is answered by the problem Scott points out: "..I have also seen a lot of people get burned by totally failing to believe that other people can possibly believe what they claim to believe."
I actually guess something more like like "a minority, at most 30%". But I don't think either you or I have any real way of knowing. And anyway it's irrelevant because it's not anybody's place to question anybody else's resons for not having children.
It's an interesting story, so even if only a dozen people hold this position, it's a story people will read. Given that the news has become mere entertainment, then entertaining >> truth.
I think the decision to have or not have children is usually made less analytically than decisions about one's diet. I'm pretty sure most people who want children didn't come to the decision by weighing the pros and cons. They have implicitly wanted children throughout their lives, have always imagined what they would be like as parents, and would feel unfulfilled never having experienced parenthood. That's my experience anyway. Deciding to stop eating meat was tough, but it seems categorically different to me.
I went vegetarian at the age of 12 and have been so since. There wasn't a lot of analysis of weighing pros and cons there for me.
Having children when I chose to have children had as much weighing of pros and cons as selecting my partner, and were somewhat bundled together.
I have known people who are engaged to their partner and still have an abortion (sometimes even going on to marry that partner, sometimes even having a kid later with that partner), so there seems to be a chunk of people weighing pros and cons there.
Sure, almost everyone weighs pros and cons about *when* to have children. But I think it's rare for people to grow up passively wanting children one day and then rationalize themselves out of that desire. And I also think a majority of people passively want children.
A lot of friends who passively want children are turning 40 in a couple of years and don't have children yet. Not too late for them or anything, but it will be that way one day. A big conflict in relationships I've seen is when one person wants kids and the other person might possibly one day want to have kids I don't know get back to me in a couple of years maybe.
I also know a lot of people who watch too much news and have their stomachs turned into knots about whether having children is an okay thing to do because racism, war, climate change, the degradation of our society, impending economic collapse. Some of those people even then have kids... and then keep worrying about whether they did the right thing.
Most people aren't analytical about much at all. Most just "go with their gut" (and with incentives). But even if you're going with your gut, sometimes you'll still sit down and think about how something is going to be absolutely terrible/wonderful because of X. This article is good to have in the world to fight against the "worry about X" meme, and to hand to specific subset of worriers and go "it's going to be okay".
Wanting kids is no guarantee it'll happen. I didn't end up with my partner by consciously analyzing pros and cons, but there were definite exclusion criteria, and not being sure about wanting kids was one of them. I feel bad for any couples who end up conflicted about it later on since it's so rare that someone will be "convinced" to the other side. More than likely the outcome will either be one partner suppressing their heart's desire to have kids or the other submitting to have kids despite their heart not truly being in it.
I also hear people talking about not having kids because of climate change and the variety of other issues you alluded to. Surely some people really mean it, and so I agree this article was worthwhile to challenge their conclusions. I'm just calling the bluff on the majority who merely say those things.
Don't watch or listen to the news. At best you should read it, and maybe not even then. Certainly not from any entity which profits from your attention, because they will optimize their coverage for that. Wikipedia has a front page with news, but even then you have to deal with the leftist bias of Wikipedia.
Choosing not have kids because of climate change is a drop in the bucket of what is causing worldwide declining fertility rates in first-world countries. Far far more contributing impacts have been woman's education, birth control, declining religiosity, and no joke gaming/antisocial behaviors becoming common.
Hi, looks like you're new to this community. Thanks for stopping by. Hope you spend some time catching on to the community norms about generalizing things to swaths of people! You'd probably be better off talking more about what you mean by "big and difficult" and maybe some data to back up what a wide and varied group of people feel feel superior about.
I think there's an element of signalling virtue (specifically signalling very-wide-ranging care, by refusing to hurt animals), and a natural consequence of finding meat-eating morally wrong is a tendency to feel morally superior to those who do it. But like most virtue-signalling, I think that aspect of it is mostly in the subconscious, and while there certainly are "ethical vegans" who will shame meat-eaters in public (e.g. PETA), there are also a bunch who don't.
I'd have to agree; it seems like the sort of thing he might learn not to do after a temporary ban. But if he's had that chance and squandered it, well, that's that.
Wow. Distinguish what Nick wrote from what magic9mushroom wrote. If you please. One wrote definitive expressions and the other hedged with some "I thinks" and "an element off" and "tendency" and "like mosts" and quotation marks around "ethical vegetarians".
I didn't really want to reply to this because I'm involved, but:
Scott feels that eating meat is morally wrong for animal-rights and environmental reasons, but he does it anyway to some degree because he's one of the people who feel unsatisfied without eating it (he tried). He has posted about this (and about the ideas he has for minimising the harm he perceives to be caused) before (https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/09/23/vegetarianism-for-meat-eaters/https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/moral-costs-of-chicken-vs-beef). As such, while Scott isn't quite an "ethical vegetarian", he's certainly adjacent to it and one of the people who has tried making "difficult life changes to stand up for his views".
Nick said:
>Ethical vegeterians don't make "big and difficult life changes to stand up for their environmental views"
...which if read literally would imply that anyone who claims to do that is lying. Accusing one's interlocutor of lying is generally a quick way to reduce a debate to battle lines rather than co-operative inquiry (if they were lying, it was already battle lines, and if they weren't they're going to feel unfairly insulted and are going to have a really hard time providing evidence of their own honesty), and Scott doesn't like debates turning into battle lines (e.g. https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/24/guided-by-the-beauty-of-our-weapons/). He presumably also felt personally accused of lying since he has indeed claimed to attempt such changes.
I did suggest that there are social biases at work, but only as part of people's reasons rather than the whole and in a subconscious way i.e. if you want to frame my post as accusation I accused people of being mildly confused rather than being deceptive.
That's the most obvious substantial difference. There's also a contextual difference (I responded to an already-broached topic rather than starting it) and a tone difference (hopefully I sounded a bit less contemptuous). My read on Scott's comment policy (https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/register-of-bans - both text and examples) is that both of these matter.
As I said, I didn't really want to do this when I'm involved, as I kind of unavoidably wind up looking like I'm patting myself on the back, but nobody else seems to have addressed these points and I care about you getting an answer more than I care about how my posts look.
I don't see it as cynical so much as "people aren't good at identifying their own motives". People don't want to have kids for any number of interconnected reasons (both rational and irrational ones). Then when asked in a poll about climate change whether the reason is climate change, they go "oh, yeah, that's probably it" and check the box.
I would expect you could get similar results in a poll asking about "wealth inequality", "racial inequality", or {insert your pet issue here} making people not want to have kids. Are concerns about global warming a contributing factor for some people? I'm sure they are, but the linked article with the survey and this post seem to be making it out to be a driving factor and I don't see this survey as enough to draw that conclusion.
Even if it were true that "no one" really does it because of climate change, I think it's fair to push back with a polite "well, actually..." since I imagine this rhetoric makes a lot of people who have/intend to have children feel at least a little guilty.
No they can be like "ah, but if I raise them all to care about the climate, I can have an exponentially increasing impact over time" and get on with their life.
Don't think it's particularly reminiscent of the Crusades. More reminiscent of Quiverfulls, and to a lesser extent everyone who's ever been a fan of public education (from Plato to Hitler to the US in Afghanistan).
That definitely read as aggressive to me as well! It's possible that computer and I have gotten used to the pleasant and pacific walled garden of SSC/ACX and you've been sojourning in the hurly-burly of the greater internet, and that's why we have different ideas about what aggression looks like.
I'm 29, I have a bit of uni debt left, a decent amount of savings, currently transitioning careers to counseling. I'm probably about 3-5 years out from seriously making this sort of choice, take or leave a few.
It's not like this article convinced me to have a kid right here and now, but it did break down this specific barrier, which was a rather large one. It's not a binary thing at all and my feelings about it all will likely change over time.
Also Sweet Jesus, my inbox is getting destroyed. Why does Substack send notifications for comments adjacent to mine
I would say three things to you, all true at once:
1) Being a parent with my wife to our three kids, now 33,31, and 27, has been the best thing I've ever done.
2) One never ceases to worry about harm happening to their children. The nature of the worry just changes over time.
3) Having a child is arguably the biggest lifetime commitment most people will make, in part because it's irreversible. So, while I'd encourage everyone to experience being a parent, i'd never criticize someone for deciding not to. I certainly would not call them lazy or immature.
Because a lot of these people with these kinds of worries aren't lazy and/or immature. Or at least they aren't any more lazy and immature than the people who are deciding to have kids. Max Gladstone recently had a good article about "adulting" which never seemed to make sense... until he had kids.
But I feel people/society tends to underplay the significant cost (in money but more so in terms of time and opportunities) involved in having kids.
Studies have now shown that parents are less happy on a day-to-day basis than the childless but report greater overall life satisfaction. I think that's correct.
"Studies have now shown that parents are less happy on a day-to-day basis than the childless but report greater overall life satisfaction. I think that's correct."
Yes. And in fact, my guess is that though they (parents) self-report lower scores on, say, a 1-10 scale, their overall level on any given day is still much higher. Which I mean in a different way than "overall life satisfaction" being higher. I mean that "given current circumstances of this day/week/month, my happiness today is a 4", maybe the kids spilled their breakfast and missed the bus. But despite it being a relatively low day, a low day for someone with kids is still overall higher than an average day for someone without kids.
That's what my observation and intuition say. I'm sure many here will have a different opinion. I wonder if there is a way to somewhat-objectively measure that number..."absolute happiness measurement at this moment".
king dedede - "despite it being a relatively low day, a low day for someone with kids is still overall higher than an average day for someone without kids".
There's been a variety of studies so hard to be sure about every study's methodology but that's not how I remember the ones I saw.
They're self reported so that's always going to be debatable but the participants were asked to measure their "absolute happiness at this moment"... and parents were coming off worst than childless.
Then again maybe I understood those results as such because this is my experience - i.e. family life is a pain on a day to day basis and I sometimes wish I was free of it but not if I have had a chance to catch my breath and think/reflect on the satisfaction of seeing my kids grow up and become their own persons...
I think so far as life-satisfaction and happiness are concerned, having children is probably a long-term investment that pays off later in life (especially toward retirement/end of life.)
With that said, I'm resistant to this idea that every difficult thing you do necessarily needs to be justified in terms of hedonic input units at the individual lifetime level. We don't exactly enjoy paying tax, but your country goes to hell if nobody does it. Roll up your damn sleeves.
Everyone, consider marrying people from the opposite tribe, and then your decisions to have kids or not will be politically neutral, so you can follow your own preferences.
I was happy Scott wrote this post because, after I've been studying climate sciences, I have been really concerned about adding another life to this world. This has eased me a bit. Just because you think that people are just simply ' lazy' to have kids doesn't mean that it is true. Feel free to read blogs or discussions in environmentalist groups and you will see that people are genuinely worried about this. I think it is so because when you start to change your life ' for greater good' (e.g. ditching animal products and sacrificing some parts of socializing, being ready to be laughed at, etc.) , it becomes much easier to change other important aspects of your life.
I am personally scared of the idea of my kid having to go through tons of anxiety, suffering and seeing environmental collapse. I wouldn't wish that to my enemy, why would I make someone dear to me experience that?
I am 25 y.o., with a partner of 6 years and relatively settled and having a decent job. He wants to have kids in near future, but I am really unsure about it.
Or “feeling uncertain”because climate change is a proxy for all the other reasons one might feel uncertain about having kids—and that particular reason makes one look good in certain circles, so is more likely to be cited.
That's more how I would see it. Maybe a dozen different thoughts that coalesce around not having kids, of which Climate Change is the one that makes them look the most socially responsible and carries lots of positive social signals within their ingroup.
It's not exactly socially beneficial to say "I hate kids" or "I don't think I'm responsible enough" or even the more mild "I don't feel that my financial situation is stable enough to support a family."
Or maybe they just don't want to have kids. I find it annoyingly selfish that natalists think anyone who chooses not to have kids, for whatever reason they give, is not being truthful when most pro-birth folks can't justify the reasons to have kids other than "I want lots of kids."
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.
Yes, which is why I find the "why don't you have kids" question infuriating. I had that put to me for several years (in my first marriage) and for many reasons my ex and I never had kids together. But we both had kids in our 2nd marriages. I have friends who can't have kids and others who have chosen not to, and others trying desperately so to have a 2nd child. I find the pro-natalist position to be infuriating at times.
Having kids is pretty fundamental to civilization and life in general. Literally every single one of your ancestors had kids. If any of them had not done so, you would not exist.
Not everyone can or should have kids, and there are certainly people who choose not to for very valid reasons. Considering the baseline importance to society, I think it's more than appropriate to ask the question from the perspective of assuming people want/will have kids. The alternative would be to stigmatize having children. If that ever caught on society would fall apart within a generation.
Having kids is fundamental from the 20,000ft view of a species propagating itself. But having kids does not mean one's life is more valued than the childless. I have 2 kids but I don't go around asking people why they're not breeding at appropriate levels to make sure the GDP growth is appropriately maintained.
This comment did strike something in my mind: Do you think it appropriate to reflect the impact of childlessness in, say, Social Security taxes? My family is (rather, will be) definitely a net contributor so I'm not going to be exactly unbiased here, but it does seem that society needs fresh blood to pay the taxes and support those who are past their productive earning years.
I'm perfectly fine with a libertarian "do what you want" approach. I would prefer, for society-level reasons, that we err on the side of having children being the "natural" approach. The default position, if you will. If it's the default position, then people will naturally ask about situations where someone isn't following the default. There can be a society where neither having nor not having children are considered a default, but I worry about the longevity and health of such a society.
My reasoning is more than I would like to get into here, so if you want to leave that as my personal preference I am fine with that.
Right, because having children is seen as a duty. A duty to your country, your family, your species, your parents, your society, and in some sense a duty to your future children themselves.
It's not the only life choice that other people will nag you about, there's plenty of others. If you're an able-bodied man during WW2 then people are going to nag if you don't choose to join the war effort. And if you live in 2021 and are forever throwing your disposable coffee cups into the landfill rather than the recycling you'll get nagged about that too.
I have a sense that if you are an able-bodied young person with good genes then you have a duty to have children, if only to balance out the dysgenic effect of all the bad-gened individuals who breed like rabbits.
Quite apart from the deeply worrying description of people as having "good" and "bad" genes, can you see why "bad-gened individuals who breed like rabbits" is an oxymoron, at least from the point of view of the genes in question?
Seriously, the species is not going to die out because some people are exercising the choice that their parents largely didn't get. Everyone going on about how people need to breed so we can get cleverer people to solve world problems - how about helping other countries whose already-existing people are not getting the resources (education, medical etc) they need to make good use of their already-existing talents? (and no, not by forcing anything on other countries, but eg cancelling the debt they "owe" to various Western powers would be an excellent start, as would enabling poorer countries to get a decent amount of Covid-19 vaccine).
Most countries owe some debt somewhere. It’s not clear at all that debt cancellation is going to produce the outcomes you suggest. And the west does in fact send lots of aid to the poorest parts of the world.
Many, perhaps all heterodox positions attract such pressure when they become apparent to peers.
A couple of examples -
I was vegetarian as a teenager (some years ago). When they found out, other kids would just suddenly take it on themselves to argue about it.
A few years ago, I saw a comedian do a set about how it's hard not to drink alcohol because of how much bystanders would try to persuade them. (The comedian also thought this was alcohol-specific.)
maybe it's better to read ramparen's post as a possible explanation rather than an accusation :) btw. what should "solid evidence" for a claim like this look like? :)
Re: solid evidence: that's exactly the problem with mind-reading posts, isn't it? There isn't much that's even falsifiable. They're just based on the cynical belief that people can't genuinely care about things other than themselves. Cynicism is really tiresome because it's nothing more than a vague set of feelings that dresses itself up as an argument.
FWIW the closest thing to evidence I can think of would look like this: find people who say they are going childless because of climate change, ask how much they expect a child to contribute to climate change, then see if they engage in other nonessential activities that contribute to climate change by more than that amount. But even that doesn't work fully, because maybe they want a child less than they want to do those other activities, or maybe they aren't aware of how much those activities contribute to climate change. And that doesn't address the people who are worried about their children's QoL at all. It's just a dumb claim to make because he can't possibly know if it's true or false.
Is that really a reprehensible motive? No one should be obligated to dedicate 18+ years of labor to raising children. It's not reprehensible to just say "I don't want to."
I don't think this requires mind reading. People hide their true motives/reasons under a veil of socially acceptable arguments all the time, and "I won't have kids because of climate change" seems like a suspiciously pro-social excuse to avoid satisfying the social expectation to have kids.
Leaving aside the question of "reprehensible", people having internal motives that don't wholly match their external justifications is actually extremely common, probably more common than the inverse. Suggesting that this extremely common thing might be happening in some particular case shouldn't require any particularly high standard of evidence.
If people’s decisions are shaped by the subconscious interplay of many different reasons, then there are likely some people for whom this reason puts them over the edge, even if this number is not as large as the number of people who cite this reason in their official explanations.
Indeed, and "subconscious interplay" is stronger here than in many other things. The thing about having kids is it's a very weighty decision, and thoughtful people have no shortage of arguments with which to talk themselves out of it in this day and age. Do I keep living my life essentially as I have, or do I make this radical, irreversible change that will transform life in ways that I don't fully understand, requiring me to apparently sacrifice much of what has brought me enjoyment up to now?
The decision to become a dad is the best one I ever made, but I was a hair's breadth away from going the other way. So I believe there are a lot of people that will be tipped by one more argument against -- especially if, instead of yet one more argument against kids, they started to hear more arguments for them.
Your basic point is correct, and applies to lots of other things as well. It's tempting to say that nobody would decide not to have kids because X, or decide to risk pregnancy because Y, or ... . But the issue isn't X or Y making all of the difference for an average person but being enough to push someone already on the margin from just doing something to just not doing it or vice versa.
Thanks, and I would agree there. Specifically, it applies most of all to cases where many people are sitting close to the margin, and I think parenthood is one of those cases. By contrast, if the case was made that chopping one's head off with a guillotine was good for the environment -- eh, someone somewhere might be convinced to act on it (to your point, we should always be cautious about insisting on "zero people" on the margin), but I don't think too many people are close to the margin there.
The skeptics seem to be modeling parenthood as something about which it's easy to have a high degree of certainty, with few people on the margin, and I just don't think it works that way at present.
You say that as though it were a bad thing. Our world doesn’t need more people to begrudgingly assume that responsibility, it would rather be well served by people not prepared to raise children recognizing their limitations and not making children.
I think people shouldn't be pressured into making a decision on this issue one way or the other. I think there are probably a lot of people that would make good parents that have swallowed bad memes on this that lead them to think it would be unethical. I also think there are a lot of people that become parents kind of on autopilot, fulfilling the expectations of their parents and culture, and don't necessarily do a great job. I think both of these are suboptimal outcomes and people should make the decision to have kids based on whether they, themselves, properly understand the gravity, challenges, and rewards associated with the proposition.
I guess what I should have said more directly is, how large is the intersection in the venn diagram where one circle is the people you described in your first post (people using climate change as a "neat excuse to avoid the responsibility and limitations that being a parent brings into your life") and the other circle is people mature enough to be parents? I don't suspect it's a very large intersection.
Children are a very serious proposition and if the distance between a person having kids and not having kids is a "neat excuse" then I think that person probably shouldn't have kids.
So your plan to fix the world is to make some children and indoctrinate them so they vote correctly and otherwise affect the world in the desired direction? For a fraction of the cost you could do the same with existing young people not biologically related to you.
Let’s say this deplorable belief is currently held by 45% of the population. What’s the most effective way of not letting it rise to 50%, raise children to abhor it or persuade some existing adults?
Interestingly enough, it appears that the people most likely to make this decision are high income westerners for whom the burden of raising and educating a child is far less imposing than it is for most of the world's people. They also tend to vote Democrat and have left/liberal opinions (specifically about Climate Change as Scott mentions).
As someone who leans conservative, I can't say that I mind seeing Democrats intentionally reduce their own future numbers. It just seems specifically counter-productive in that a group is reducing their own reproduction in favor of individuals who are less prepared and less capable of raising a future generation, at least in terms of available resources.
If you are so upset about university kids getting triggered about Shakespeare or something you need to bring it up on unrelated internet think-pieces, you might be a bit in your feelings.
Re: burden -- if you live in a high cost of living city and you're secular and college-educated, the opportunity cost of having children is extraordinary high. Childcare is very expensive, you're less likely to have family nearby who can help (and is young enough) housing is expensive (particularly if you're trying to manage two commutes and get your kids into schools that would be average in much of the country), managing two careers is stressful but quitting is hard to afford and has potentially huge lifetime costs, you are unlikely to have a peer group that validates doing this as of course the correct choice and provides an array of family-friendly social options. And what you're giving up (at least for awhile, and longer depending on your circumstances) is also just really, really fun, for a wide range of types of fun.
I agree with you on most of this. I would ask people who fit the typical left/progressive/liberal mindset and value city living and high income intellectual pursuits to really evaluate the truth in Emily's response here. Sure you have a higher level of education than most conservatives, and make a lot of money, but there are massive tradeoffs involved. Someone who wants to raise a family may in fact reject many tenets of the modern liberal/left and be making a rational decision on the merits.
As a parent with an almost two-year old. I would say that you trade some types of fun with new types of fun. Playing with a small child and having them hug you and teaching them things is very very fun, while getting drunk at dinner parties was starting to get old. There are some fun things we've given up doing as much for the time being, like as many ski trips and traveling, but in a few years' time, we can do those things again with children.
I think the tough thing for a lot of millennials is that we graduated into a bad economy that was making the shift to tech when a lot of us studied things like history and sociology and just when we are all getting out of debt and getting underway in our careers and having extra money to have fun, we are faced with the decision to have kids because we're all in our 30s. It's tough and I understand why people wait, but in retrospect, I kinda wish we had kids earlier and got through the phase of raising a young child when we were younger.
I don't dispute that kids are fun, but they're just as much fun in places with fewer restaurants or theatre options or whatever else you're into that cities provide. My point was about the relative opportunity costs being higher in some places/communities than others.
Climate change is one of a whole bunch of ways in which the world is getting worse and will continue to get worse. Meanwhile, as someone who has chosen not to have kids, I find myself under continuous pressure to justify myself - to give a full accounting of my reasons - not so that they can be debated, but so that they might be dismissed. After years of nagging, I have no energy left for debate - my reflex when asked "why don't you have kids" is to respond with the shortest combination of syllables that will shut down this line of conversation. "Climate change" works well for this purpose and has the advantage of also being part of the truth (I note the article linked to in the first paragraph mentions "having less opportunity than their parents" as a reason. Certainly it's hard to choose kids when you can't afford a home or basic necessities.) I know many others who find themselves in a similar place. I don't know how significant the effect is - it may be that I am in a small bubble and most people's experience is different - but I have to wonder whether the polling was done in a way likely to expose it or not.
>Climate change is one of a whole bunch of ways in which the world is getting worse and will continue to get worse
I just want you to know that, factually, you're probably incorrect on this by any reasonable definition of "worse." I also think that believing "the world is getting worse and going to get worse" is somewhat of a self-fulfilling prophecy for those who believe it, because it makes you think that life is mostly full of zero and negative sum games, which will cause you to act in zero and negative sum ways in the world and therefore miss out on positive-sum opportunities.
The main way in which it feels like the world is getting worse over the time I have been alive is a global shift away from cooperation and mutual support and towards individualism and self-interest; coupled more recently with a disturbing growth in apathy towards truth and fact. Basically, all the trends from "meditations on Moloch". Climate change, income inequality, Trump, Brexit, the antivax movement, lack of housing, collapsing healthcare systems - these are all symptoms of us losing the ability to cooperate to solve large problems and support the weakest in society, as was possible last century; and of being to keep the public informed and not apathetic - which may or may not be a thing we ever could do, that is less obvious. In any case, "better" is, of course, relative, and after the last two decades of election cycles I have become convinced that a majority - perhaps only a large pluriality, but between apathy and in-fighting that is enough - prefer the world to be this way. Thus, the longterm trend as I see it is towards boot in human face, forever; or, perhaps, some kind of revolution - though that outcome is, I feel, unlikely. In any case, neither of those feels like a world I would wish on someone. I used to be optimistic about new generations being able to improve things, but TBH I've lost that over the last two decades or so.
When you say the world is getting worse, do you mean the UK and US? If so, I might agree with you. If not, I completely disagree, because you neglected to mention: a billion people escaping poverty, the virtual eradication of polio, the banishment of famine from nearly every country, rapid rises in education and literacy rates, record low deaths due to warfare...
To be fair, my opinions largely are based on the UK and US; I have much more visibility there than elsewhere. (The various splinters of what used to be the soviet union are a separate and complex conversation - though I certainly don't believe they disprove the thesis).
I think your natural human negativity bias is really cranked up here. None of the problems you listed are nearly as bad as how good the fact that billions of people have been lifted out of extreme poverty over the last half-century. Maybe you follow the news too much? I don't exactly want to get into a point-by-point refutation but I really feel that that's the only way to alleviate your concerns, which I do strongly believe are misplaced if you truly believe that "the world is getting worse and will continue to get worse."
>meditations on Moloch
I consider this piece to be about "why cooperation can be hard" not "the future is doomed!"
>Climate change
a real problem but, as Scott's piece lays out quite well, mostly causes life in the first world to head towards "not as good as it could have been" instead of "objectively worse than life was circa 2020."
>income inequality
I consider myself a progressive, but remain stupefied by how this is such a big issue. The only thing I can think of is that "envy is extremely powerful" but I really don't want to chalk up the majority of concern over income inequality to envy. I understand that high inequality can lead to political instability, but that means that income inequality is an instrumental concern, perhaps worth worrying about if Occupy Wall St was a more serious movement than it was. I haven't been convinced that income inequality per se is really bad. In order to make an income, one needs to be productive. There are inefficiencies in the market, to be sure, but in general no one is going to pay you a lot of money if you didn't provide value to them. Since the floor is set at $0, then higher income inequality means that someone is being more productive than anyone ever has been before. I consider this a good thing. I think that most people that get mad at me over this opinion are just attempting to justify their own envy, perhaps even to themselves. I also think we should build a more robust welfare state, but over time we have done that and I suspect in the future we will continue to make it better.
>Trump
Trump is/was bad but our institutions and system of government held up better than I would have expected them to so by the end of his presidency I actually updated towards a higher faith in our government.
>Brexit
I'm not an expert on European politics but this seems objectively not a big deal at all. The EU was meant to prevent intra-European war. War between the EU and the UK still seems quite inconceivable to my American perspective having traveled in Europe.
>the antivax movement
Has always been around, will always be around, and is probably smaller today than it ever was. Vaccine development, on the other hand, is objectively faster, safer, and better than it ever has been by a lot.
>lack of housing
A real problem, but mostly just an economic problem that, not to downplay it (I, too, rent in a HCOL city) but, does absolutely not rise to the level of "life is objectively worse" compared to 50 years ago. California has also made good political progress on this recently and as more boomers age out of the voting population it will become a higher salience issue in politics. The solution, although it takes time, is quite easy anyway: just build more housing.
>collapsing healthcare systems
I don't really know what this refers to other than the fact that our healthcare systems are under stress due to a current pandemic, which is about as big of a stress test as hospital systems could ever undergo. My sister is a nurse and, although she has had to work a ton over the past year, never once caught covid, which I think is a sign that our healthcare systems are extremely competent.
Overall I suspect that you are trapped in a very negatively-biased information ecosystem and I would recommend trying to get out of it, because I can't imagine that having such an outlook on life, especially if it isn't accurate (as I don't think it is), is good for your long-term mental wellbeing.
As I mentioned, I see these as *symptoms*. The common theme is that not only is cooperation hard, but over and over again we're *choosing not to try*; and hence the conclusion that the world is getting worse.
Climate change could be mitigated if we treated it as an actual immediate emergency - like we did the pandemic - where actually dealing with the problem takes precedence over the politics of looking good and dividing the pork, at least to the extent that significant chunks of the population *got vaccinated*; instead of even a fraction of this sort of concerted effort being applied to fixing how we generate energy, move stuff around etc we have political debates and outright denial.
Income inequality - "In order to make an income, one needs to be productive." Certainly in order for income to be made, *someone* needs to be productive, but the person making the income need not be the person being productive, and *this* is why income inequality is a valuable metric and ultimately leads to political instability: in a society that is much more productive than any before it, the net results of all the productivity are concentrated among just a few rentiers. This could be addressed by cooperating on a variety of policies, but the prevailing opinion is that we need less of that sort of thing, not more.
Trump - that he got elected shows a failure, not only of cooperation, but of the very desire to cooperate; and at the end we are left with a significant and growing portion of society that deliberately oppose truth and fact.
Brexit - here, a nation deliberately chose to end cooperation with their closest trading partner as part of a right-wing party's political game; in a game of prisoner's dilemma, a majority of the electorate chose defect over cooperate.
Lack of housing - would, as you say, be easy to fix *except we can't cooperate long enough to get it done*. It's been done in the past - but the social housing booms of mid-last-century would be impossible in the current political climate.
Collapsing healthcare systems - in the US, the healthcare system is essentially unusable by a large chunk of the population except for emergency treatment without risk of bankruptcy; in the UK, the majority party also want a system that works this way.
The world where things like eradicating polio, building social housing - or even just replacing existing social housing that is sold, choosing to work more closely with our neighbours instead of sacrificing our future well-being just to separate ourselves from them... that world seems very far away.
The overall pandemic response was, as you say, encouraging; and yet every day I commute I am surrounded by people who, when asked to choose between their comfort and the comfort of and risk to those around them, choose their own comfort; patriots, perhaps, who would do anything for their country except wear a mildly inconveniencing piece of cloth over their face. Every day there are more; that old utilitarian conundrum of dust specks in ten thousand people's eyes vs torture and death for a single person plays out every day, and society has spoken: torture and death it is, we cannot tolerate the dust specks.
Perhaps this helps clarify the pattern I see: less cooperation and less desire for cooperation over time.
It may be that you are right and I am trapped in an information bubble, or very likely as the other commenter suggested this is a uniquely US/UK-centric experience. However it is in this environment that I live and where any children would live.
In your opinion, is life getting worse for the median person in the US? It very clearly isn't for the median person in the world, but I'm less sure about the US.
No, I don't think so at all. I think there's an outrageous negativity bias in the media. I think this becomes pretty apparent if you delete all of your social media and stop consuming content from most news publications.
To take an example of one thing: air pollution almost anywhere in the US is at basically an all-time low since WW1, and will continue to decrease as we electrify vehicles and decommission coal plants. I think the impact of decreasing air pollution is incredibly underrated, and will basically make everyone smarter, healthier, more cooperative, more productive, and impose fewer costs on the healthcare system.
Crime has continued to decrease across the board since the 90s crime wave, with minor blips in certain areas which always make a lot of news. This may be partially due to steadily declining pollution, and other factors.
There are like a dozen stats like this that are extremely boring and are really forgettable because no one really needs to operationalize this information, so why bother remembering it? But it seems like you're familiar with many of these, considering that it is "very clear" to you that most of the world is getting better. Technology plods on, which in general improves everyone's lives. MRNA technology seems promising to cure malaria, it may also prove effective at various other diseases. Medicine in general looks extremely optimistic, mostly because the advances in data science over the past 20 years seem to have a ton of applications in things like genetics and drug-discovery. People in the US will generally be the first to experience these advances in technology.
I understand, very much, concerns over the political climate but I tend to think we're more discovering the shortcomings of the system that always existed rather than seeing things get worse. I think that if you stay plugged into social media, you might in some kind of trance to not realize all the great things going on. Some vlogger named Gabby Petito was killed by her boyfriend and oh my god what a tragedy but when you step back you realize what it means that a single person being murdered several months ago is the biggest news story going on right now, things actually must be pretty good.
Gøpbal income inequality has probably been declining at least since the late 1980s. This is because global income inequality = inequality between countries x inequality within countries. Although inequality within countries is on the rise most places, inequality between countries is on the decline, and the bulk of global income inequality is inequality between countries. The classic in this regard is Milanovic's 2013 article Global Income Inequality in Numbers.
Well "deserve" is a loaded term, depends heavily on your normative ethics and/or metaphysics, and I didn't use it.
But outside of rare cases that become extremely publicized like Adam Neumann, no one gets handed a billion dollars. Someone like Jeff Bezos made many trades with many people, and the people he made trades with did so willingly. Elon Musk made many good trades with many people, could have comfortably retired filthy rich after PayPal but instead decided to bet all of his money and continue working 80+ hour weeks for the next 15 years, and today lives in a 300 sq ft mobile home.
As far as my opinion of "deserve," I think inheritance is morally wrong, and that there should be a 100% death tax, and we should call it a death tax. I think with that in place, we should feel comfortable praising the wealth of people who accomplish a lot. I don't think it makes sense to lump all billionaires in as one group, that makes it look like you're really operating on envy.
But was it "really possible" last century to support the weakest in society? Or do we remember the past mostly by the propaganda they told themselves? How much of your beliefs in this area are based on objective differences vs the difference of actually living through today's problems vs reading a summary of yesterday's problems?
That article has it wrong. The same thing that is happening with other churches is happening with the LDS church. You have to understand that they put MASSIVE emphasis on growth, converting new members, and having large families -- much, much more than other churches. All young men spend two whole years on a mission just trying to convert people. And yet, despite that, their growth rates have fallen off drastically and they're now in stasis, birth rates are falling, and they're keeping less than half of their members born after 1980 (it used be they kept 75%). The LDS Church does whatever it can to cover this up for PR, but the fact is, they're treading water mostly on converting poor people from undeveloped countries and riding off the fact that birth rates are still higher than the rest of the US (but plunging within the LDS community). They're losing young members rapidly just like all other churches, with the generations who grew up in the internet era. https://religionnews.com/2019/03/27/how-many-millennials-are-really-leaving-the-lds-church/
I'm sorry to hear that life sucks for you. For me it's pretty great, so I'm happy to give that gift to a few new people, made out of the DNA of my two favourite people.
Wage slave I take it is not an accepted term in the US? That culture seem to glorify working all the time. I've heard people going to doctors or therapists and then jump you like a shark if one admits one is currently unemployed. It's horrific and inhumane.
"Life sucks."
Compared to what?
Actually, is this true? I think only a really tiny number of people will have children who don't earn $30,000 in their lifetime, and if you're earning money, aren't you contributing to the world (as per the market's best ability to assess).
Perhaps since you're getting the $30,000 that compensates you for your contribution and leaves you neutral, but surely laborers in most industries don't capture all of the value they create.
Great points. Let’s assume one in a million kids might have the intellect to graduate college and help develop some technology that would really move the needle on climate change. 140 of those kids are born worldwide every year. I would suggest the more of them born in the first world, the better the chance they will graduate and develop the answers we all need. Rationally, if it’s answers we want, western parents should be upping their game
Truly so. The real catastrophe as of 2100 is more likely to be of the people of the future looking back and feeling bad for us for existing in less well off circumstances than them and experiencing disproportionate climate dread on top of it
There are two simple numbers for this. World GDP is projected to grow by 450% by 2100. The mainstream projection for climate costs by then will result in a world merely 434% better off. Furthermore the projections are that developing countries will catch up substantially - the statement "climate change will hit subsistence farmers hard" is reasonable, yet the average person in a low income country will have experienced a large scale wealth increase. Based on this I would expect the correct statement about subsistence farmers would be to say that fewer of them will rise above certain poverty levels than otherwise would have while a smaller number will experience severe hardship, assuming their newly better off nations choose to do nothing about it
These are the mainstream average numbers so what about a catastrophe that is predicted to be very unlikely? I believe the lowest projected GDP growth by 2100 is 100%, in this paper: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959378015000242
There are three main climate economic dynamic modeling systems and none of them project a "business as usual" climate cost of 5% of GDP in 2100, so take that as the warming cost to the economy in 2100. This extreme vs extreme scenario results in a world 95% richer per capita in 2100
What about extreme vs extreme², a real catastrophe? I believe these events are up in the 95th percentile of scenarios - for example this is the range of likelihood of RPC 8.5, the "business as usual" emissions scenario that roughly projects a new coal plant to be build every day from now to 2100
But it's not just that. If a catastrophic level event started happening such as methane release from the arctic you would also have to factor in the likelihood of us doing nothing about it. And there is a proven solution to a major situation in the form of volcanic aerosols documented to have a global cooling effect. Even at a low social cost of carbon the benefit to cost ratio of firing sulphur dioxide into the stratosphere with naval artillery is 20-1 - not considering the costs of reducing sunlight. Thus the true cost of a catastrophe has a hard cap according to how plant growth and solar panels were affected by this particular edge case. There also appears to be an eminently achievable edge case geoengineering technology in marine cloud brightening with sea water aerosol, at far less direct cost than the sulphur dioxide and a far less further cost as the main sunlight blocking would be over the oceans
Not only do you need an extreme case vs extreme case² outcome for anything to happen that can be actually called catastrophic, there is yet another factor where a 95th percentile climate costs scenario presumably has something like a 95% chance of being met with a backstop geoengineering project
Why would you feel morally wrong about imaginary people? This just doesn't make sense.
"No one" is a strong claim, and given that eg ethical vegetarians definitely exist, it sure seems like people are willing to make extremely big and difficult life changes to stand up for their environmental views. I agree we should sometimes be cynical about people's real motives, but I have also seen a lot of people get burned by totally failing to believe that other people can possibly believe what they claim to believe.
I think it's fair to presume that in all (lol) cases where people use words like 'all' and 'no one' they are saying 'materially all/none' because it gets awkward typing that out all the time just like he/she and similar.
"Materially all" is still a hell of a big claim. And probably a false one in this case.
Fair enough but I felt like Scott was glomming onto it in a sort of unfair way. It may still be false but I am receptive to the concept that people need to justify why they don't have children. And I that in the non-judgmental way of seeing it from the perspective of fellow executives who were childless and the questions raised on semi-regular bases.
I have to ask: why could somebody have to justify NOT having children?
When I'm dealing with somebody I disagree with, I can usually at least understand the reasons for their position, and very often I can emphathize, even see myself sharing their vewpoint if I weighted things differently.
On this one, I seriously have any problem even generating possible reasons to think that, and the best ones I can come up with seem totally crazy to me, either on their face or if I follow their implications one step further out.
It bothers me to not even be able to comphrehend the other person's view.
From the collectivist point of view, raising the next generation is something that has to be done in order to avoid social collapse, and therefore if you can (and an executive presumably has the money to) you should.
From an instinctive point of view, having kids is something most people do and want to do and so if you don't do it when you clearly can you might be [a sociopath/a radical/a pod person/otherwise Bad News]. Not having kids is more likely to draw accusations of sociopathy than normal, since raising kids is seen as altruistic (and the rate of sociopathy among CEOs is far higher than normal, so it's a more-believable claim).
Not saying I agree with either of these (I'm sympathetic to the first one, but I think the Soviet solution of childlessness tax is more efficient), and the second one is perhaps uncharitable, but I'm reasonably sure those are thought processes that get used.
Are your parents okay with not having grandchildren ever, and their lineage terminating at you?
Mine have to suck it up, but I don't think they're happy about it.
One perspective is the aspect of social ("tribal"?) cohesion based on the presumption that your close community generally shares the same values/principles/social norms/etc, and you can expect that others will do as you expect (predictability is very useful) because they (by default) share your views.
So, whenever someone asserts that they won't do as most others would, the request for justification is obvious from this perspective. if you diverge from social norms because you want different things or have different values, that becomes a bit alarming - so perhaps we shouldn't rely on you following all the other social norms as well? Then the "tribe" has to treat you as a "mental foreigner" and analyze your motives instead of doing the simple way and assuming that you're essentially the same as everyone else. But If there's an objective reason where the other person, if they were in your shoes, would also act the same way, that's socially acceptable and passes "tribal allegiance" test, because it doesn't imply that you would be divergent for any other social norms and values.
TL;DR - people ask you to justify unusual decisions because they signal a potential misalignment of personal values, and a justification is a way to verify/reassert an alignment of values.
I don't think here of all places is a bad place to ask people to not use hyperbole. And of all people to ask it, our host is likely one of the best people to ask it.
I suppose you could say it would also be appropriate to steelman their argument and actually respond to the argument you think they are making instead of the argument they are actually stating. However, that runs both into the problem that Scott points out AND is answered by the problem Scott points out: "..I have also seen a lot of people get burned by totally failing to believe that other people can possibly believe what they claim to believe."
How about "the big majority, spare a 10% at best?"
I actually guess something more like like "a minority, at most 30%". But I don't think either you or I have any real way of knowing. And anyway it's irrelevant because it's not anybody's place to question anybody else's resons for not having children.
It is if they go to the trouble of writing about/advocating for their reasons.
It's an interesting story, so even if only a dozen people hold this position, it's a story people will read. Given that the news has become mere entertainment, then entertaining >> truth.
I think the decision to have or not have children is usually made less analytically than decisions about one's diet. I'm pretty sure most people who want children didn't come to the decision by weighing the pros and cons. They have implicitly wanted children throughout their lives, have always imagined what they would be like as parents, and would feel unfulfilled never having experienced parenthood. That's my experience anyway. Deciding to stop eating meat was tough, but it seems categorically different to me.
I went vegetarian at the age of 12 and have been so since. There wasn't a lot of analysis of weighing pros and cons there for me.
Having children when I chose to have children had as much weighing of pros and cons as selecting my partner, and were somewhat bundled together.
I have known people who are engaged to their partner and still have an abortion (sometimes even going on to marry that partner, sometimes even having a kid later with that partner), so there seems to be a chunk of people weighing pros and cons there.
Sure, almost everyone weighs pros and cons about *when* to have children. But I think it's rare for people to grow up passively wanting children one day and then rationalize themselves out of that desire. And I also think a majority of people passively want children.
A lot of friends who passively want children are turning 40 in a couple of years and don't have children yet. Not too late for them or anything, but it will be that way one day. A big conflict in relationships I've seen is when one person wants kids and the other person might possibly one day want to have kids I don't know get back to me in a couple of years maybe.
I also know a lot of people who watch too much news and have their stomachs turned into knots about whether having children is an okay thing to do because racism, war, climate change, the degradation of our society, impending economic collapse. Some of those people even then have kids... and then keep worrying about whether they did the right thing.
Most people aren't analytical about much at all. Most just "go with their gut" (and with incentives). But even if you're going with your gut, sometimes you'll still sit down and think about how something is going to be absolutely terrible/wonderful because of X. This article is good to have in the world to fight against the "worry about X" meme, and to hand to specific subset of worriers and go "it's going to be okay".
Wanting kids is no guarantee it'll happen. I didn't end up with my partner by consciously analyzing pros and cons, but there were definite exclusion criteria, and not being sure about wanting kids was one of them. I feel bad for any couples who end up conflicted about it later on since it's so rare that someone will be "convinced" to the other side. More than likely the outcome will either be one partner suppressing their heart's desire to have kids or the other submitting to have kids despite their heart not truly being in it.
I also hear people talking about not having kids because of climate change and the variety of other issues you alluded to. Surely some people really mean it, and so I agree this article was worthwhile to challenge their conclusions. I'm just calling the bluff on the majority who merely say those things.
Don't watch or listen to the news. At best you should read it, and maybe not even then. Certainly not from any entity which profits from your attention, because they will optimize their coverage for that. Wikipedia has a front page with news, but even then you have to deal with the leftist bias of Wikipedia.
Choosing not have kids because of climate change is a drop in the bucket of what is causing worldwide declining fertility rates in first-world countries. Far far more contributing impacts have been woman's education, birth control, declining religiosity, and no joke gaming/antisocial behaviors becoming common.
That's rich.
Hi, looks like you're new to this community. Thanks for stopping by. Hope you spend some time catching on to the community norms about generalizing things to swaths of people! You'd probably be better off talking more about what you mean by "big and difficult" and maybe some data to back up what a wide and varied group of people feel feel superior about.
I think there's an element of signalling virtue (specifically signalling very-wide-ranging care, by refusing to hurt animals), and a natural consequence of finding meat-eating morally wrong is a tendency to feel morally superior to those who do it. But like most virtue-signalling, I think that aspect of it is mostly in the subconscious, and while there certainly are "ethical vegans" who will shame meat-eaters in public (e.g. PETA), there are also a bunch who don't.
I have banned Nick indefinitely for this comment.
Indefinitely seems harsh, unless this was a repeat offender
I'd have to agree; it seems like the sort of thing he might learn not to do after a temporary ban. But if he's had that chance and squandered it, well, that's that.
We need "some" moderation or this forum will turn into cesspit, like a typical internet forum.
And Scott is one guy, so the moderation is going to have to be quick and dirty.
Wow. Distinguish what Nick wrote from what magic9mushroom wrote. If you please. One wrote definitive expressions and the other hedged with some "I thinks" and "an element off" and "tendency" and "like mosts" and quotation marks around "ethical vegetarians".
Nick wrote it as a conclusion, forcing other people do to all the work to disprove the thesis he spent 18 seconds typing.
(I wouldn't ban indefinitely, but it's Scott's blog and maybe he thinks it's time for another reign of terror.)
So adding the qualifiers I mentioned makes the comment not a conclusion? Just trying to get the protocol. Maybe it is Vo over my head b
I didn't really want to reply to this because I'm involved, but:
Scott feels that eating meat is morally wrong for animal-rights and environmental reasons, but he does it anyway to some degree because he's one of the people who feel unsatisfied without eating it (he tried). He has posted about this (and about the ideas he has for minimising the harm he perceives to be caused) before (https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/09/23/vegetarianism-for-meat-eaters/ https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/moral-costs-of-chicken-vs-beef). As such, while Scott isn't quite an "ethical vegetarian", he's certainly adjacent to it and one of the people who has tried making "difficult life changes to stand up for his views".
Nick said:
>Ethical vegeterians don't make "big and difficult life changes to stand up for their environmental views"
...which if read literally would imply that anyone who claims to do that is lying. Accusing one's interlocutor of lying is generally a quick way to reduce a debate to battle lines rather than co-operative inquiry (if they were lying, it was already battle lines, and if they weren't they're going to feel unfairly insulted and are going to have a really hard time providing evidence of their own honesty), and Scott doesn't like debates turning into battle lines (e.g. https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/24/guided-by-the-beauty-of-our-weapons/). He presumably also felt personally accused of lying since he has indeed claimed to attempt such changes.
I did suggest that there are social biases at work, but only as part of people's reasons rather than the whole and in a subconscious way i.e. if you want to frame my post as accusation I accused people of being mildly confused rather than being deceptive.
That's the most obvious substantial difference. There's also a contextual difference (I responded to an already-broached topic rather than starting it) and a tone difference (hopefully I sounded a bit less contemptuous). My read on Scott's comment policy (https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/register-of-bans - both text and examples) is that both of these matter.
As I said, I didn't really want to do this when I'm involved, as I kind of unavoidably wind up looking like I'm patting myself on the back, but nobody else seems to have addressed these points and I care about you getting an answer more than I care about how my posts look.
I don't see it as cynical so much as "people aren't good at identifying their own motives". People don't want to have kids for any number of interconnected reasons (both rational and irrational ones). Then when asked in a poll about climate change whether the reason is climate change, they go "oh, yeah, that's probably it" and check the box.
I would expect you could get similar results in a poll asking about "wealth inequality", "racial inequality", or {insert your pet issue here} making people not want to have kids. Are concerns about global warming a contributing factor for some people? I'm sure they are, but the linked article with the survey and this post seem to be making it out to be a driving factor and I don't see this survey as enough to draw that conclusion.
Even if it were true that "no one" really does it because of climate change, I think it's fair to push back with a polite "well, actually..." since I imagine this rhetoric makes a lot of people who have/intend to have children feel at least a little guilty.
No they can be like "ah, but if I raise them all to care about the climate, I can have an exponentially increasing impact over time" and get on with their life.
Don't think it's particularly reminiscent of the Crusades. More reminiscent of Quiverfulls, and to a lesser extent everyone who's ever been a fan of public education (from Plato to Hitler to the US in Afghanistan).
I am no one, and this article has actually cause me to rethink my stance
I wold be less aggressive with asking for personal data.
That definitely read as aggressive to me as well! It's possible that computer and I have gotten used to the pleasant and pacific walled garden of SSC/ACX and you've been sojourning in the hurly-burly of the greater internet, and that's why we have different ideas about what aggression looks like.
My first thought was that ramparen was asking for information to evaluate Jon as a candidate for dating.
It read as aggressive to me as well. Along similar lines of "Oh, so you're a fan of [...]? Ok, name every album."
To add to the confusion, I read "aggressive" to not mean combative, but instead just asking for a lot of personal data at once.
I'm 29, I have a bit of uni debt left, a decent amount of savings, currently transitioning careers to counseling. I'm probably about 3-5 years out from seriously making this sort of choice, take or leave a few.
It's not like this article convinced me to have a kid right here and now, but it did break down this specific barrier, which was a rather large one. It's not a binary thing at all and my feelings about it all will likely change over time.
Also Sweet Jesus, my inbox is getting destroyed. Why does Substack send notifications for comments adjacent to mine
Girlfriend of 3 years, considering marriage
Since people mostly ignore my commentary ngl I'm mostly jealous. So have another piece of notification spam to brighten your day! =D
What are you jealous of? (I can't tell if this is a reply to my comment or not, gawd this comment system is awful)
I would say three things to you, all true at once:
1) Being a parent with my wife to our three kids, now 33,31, and 27, has been the best thing I've ever done.
2) One never ceases to worry about harm happening to their children. The nature of the worry just changes over time.
3) Having a child is arguably the biggest lifetime commitment most people will make, in part because it's irreversible. So, while I'd encourage everyone to experience being a parent, i'd never criticize someone for deciding not to. I certainly would not call them lazy or immature.
Agreed. And anyways, why would we want to try to convince lazy and/or immature people to have kids? Is that really such a good idea?
Because a lot of these people with these kinds of worries aren't lazy and/or immature. Or at least they aren't any more lazy and immature than the people who are deciding to have kids. Max Gladstone recently had a good article about "adulting" which never seemed to make sense... until he had kids.
My experience as well.
But I feel people/society tends to underplay the significant cost (in money but more so in terms of time and opportunities) involved in having kids.
Studies have now shown that parents are less happy on a day-to-day basis than the childless but report greater overall life satisfaction. I think that's correct.
"Studies have now shown that parents are less happy on a day-to-day basis than the childless but report greater overall life satisfaction. I think that's correct."
Yes. And in fact, my guess is that though they (parents) self-report lower scores on, say, a 1-10 scale, their overall level on any given day is still much higher. Which I mean in a different way than "overall life satisfaction" being higher. I mean that "given current circumstances of this day/week/month, my happiness today is a 4", maybe the kids spilled their breakfast and missed the bus. But despite it being a relatively low day, a low day for someone with kids is still overall higher than an average day for someone without kids.
That's what my observation and intuition say. I'm sure many here will have a different opinion. I wonder if there is a way to somewhat-objectively measure that number..."absolute happiness measurement at this moment".
king dedede - "despite it being a relatively low day, a low day for someone with kids is still overall higher than an average day for someone without kids".
There's been a variety of studies so hard to be sure about every study's methodology but that's not how I remember the ones I saw.
They're self reported so that's always going to be debatable but the participants were asked to measure their "absolute happiness at this moment"... and parents were coming off worst than childless.
Then again maybe I understood those results as such because this is my experience - i.e. family life is a pain on a day to day basis and I sometimes wish I was free of it but not if I have had a chance to catch my breath and think/reflect on the satisfaction of seeing my kids grow up and become their own persons...
I think so far as life-satisfaction and happiness are concerned, having children is probably a long-term investment that pays off later in life (especially toward retirement/end of life.)
With that said, I'm resistant to this idea that every difficult thing you do necessarily needs to be justified in terms of hedonic input units at the individual lifetime level. We don't exactly enjoy paying tax, but your country goes to hell if nobody does it. Roll up your damn sleeves.
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 :)
If you just don't want to have kids, consider offsetting them by persuading a republican to do the same.
Everyone, consider marrying people from the opposite tribe, and then your decisions to have kids or not will be politically neutral, so you can follow your own preferences.
I was happy Scott wrote this post because, after I've been studying climate sciences, I have been really concerned about adding another life to this world. This has eased me a bit. Just because you think that people are just simply ' lazy' to have kids doesn't mean that it is true. Feel free to read blogs or discussions in environmentalist groups and you will see that people are genuinely worried about this. I think it is so because when you start to change your life ' for greater good' (e.g. ditching animal products and sacrificing some parts of socializing, being ready to be laughed at, etc.) , it becomes much easier to change other important aspects of your life.
I am personally scared of the idea of my kid having to go through tons of anxiety, suffering and seeing environmental collapse. I wouldn't wish that to my enemy, why would I make someone dear to me experience that?
I am 25 y.o., with a partner of 6 years and relatively settled and having a decent job. He wants to have kids in near future, but I am really unsure about it.
Or “feeling uncertain”because climate change is a proxy for all the other reasons one might feel uncertain about having kids—and that particular reason makes one look good in certain circles, so is more likely to be cited.
That's more how I would see it. Maybe a dozen different thoughts that coalesce around not having kids, of which Climate Change is the one that makes them look the most socially responsible and carries lots of positive social signals within their ingroup.
It's not exactly socially beneficial to say "I hate kids" or "I don't think I'm responsible enough" or even the more mild "I don't feel that my financial situation is stable enough to support a family."
Or maybe they just don't want to have kids. I find it annoyingly selfish that natalists think anyone who chooses not to have kids, for whatever reason they give, is not being truthful when most pro-birth folks can't justify the reasons to have kids other than "I want lots of kids."
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.
Yes, which is why I find the "why don't you have kids" question infuriating. I had that put to me for several years (in my first marriage) and for many reasons my ex and I never had kids together. But we both had kids in our 2nd marriages. I have friends who can't have kids and others who have chosen not to, and others trying desperately so to have a 2nd child. I find the pro-natalist position to be infuriating at times.
Having kids is pretty fundamental to civilization and life in general. Literally every single one of your ancestors had kids. If any of them had not done so, you would not exist.
Not everyone can or should have kids, and there are certainly people who choose not to for very valid reasons. Considering the baseline importance to society, I think it's more than appropriate to ask the question from the perspective of assuming people want/will have kids. The alternative would be to stigmatize having children. If that ever caught on society would fall apart within a generation.
Having kids is fundamental from the 20,000ft view of a species propagating itself. But having kids does not mean one's life is more valued than the childless. I have 2 kids but I don't go around asking people why they're not breeding at appropriate levels to make sure the GDP growth is appropriately maintained.
This comment did strike something in my mind: Do you think it appropriate to reflect the impact of childlessness in, say, Social Security taxes? My family is (rather, will be) definitely a net contributor so I'm not going to be exactly unbiased here, but it does seem that society needs fresh blood to pay the taxes and support those who are past their productive earning years.
Why is stigmatizing having children the alternative? Why do we have to attach stigma to anything?
I'm perfectly fine with a libertarian "do what you want" approach. I would prefer, for society-level reasons, that we err on the side of having children being the "natural" approach. The default position, if you will. If it's the default position, then people will naturally ask about situations where someone isn't following the default. There can be a society where neither having nor not having children are considered a default, but I worry about the longevity and health of such a society.
My reasoning is more than I would like to get into here, so if you want to leave that as my personal preference I am fine with that.
Right, because having children is seen as a duty. A duty to your country, your family, your species, your parents, your society, and in some sense a duty to your future children themselves.
It's not the only life choice that other people will nag you about, there's plenty of others. If you're an able-bodied man during WW2 then people are going to nag if you don't choose to join the war effort. And if you live in 2021 and are forever throwing your disposable coffee cups into the landfill rather than the recycling you'll get nagged about that too.
I have a sense that if you are an able-bodied young person with good genes then you have a duty to have children, if only to balance out the dysgenic effect of all the bad-gened individuals who breed like rabbits.
Quite apart from the deeply worrying description of people as having "good" and "bad" genes, can you see why "bad-gened individuals who breed like rabbits" is an oxymoron, at least from the point of view of the genes in question?
Seriously, the species is not going to die out because some people are exercising the choice that their parents largely didn't get. Everyone going on about how people need to breed so we can get cleverer people to solve world problems - how about helping other countries whose already-existing people are not getting the resources (education, medical etc) they need to make good use of their already-existing talents? (and no, not by forcing anything on other countries, but eg cancelling the debt they "owe" to various Western powers would be an excellent start, as would enabling poorer countries to get a decent amount of Covid-19 vaccine).
Most countries owe some debt somewhere. It’s not clear at all that debt cancellation is going to produce the outcomes you suggest. And the west does in fact send lots of aid to the poorest parts of the world.
I don't think this is actually true.
Many, perhaps all heterodox positions attract such pressure when they become apparent to peers.
A couple of examples -
I was vegetarian as a teenager (some years ago). When they found out, other kids would just suddenly take it on themselves to argue about it.
A few years ago, I saw a comedian do a set about how it's hard not to drink alcohol because of how much bystanders would try to persuade them. (The comedian also thought this was alcohol-specific.)
I find this kind of arrogant "mind-reading" bullshit extremely annoying.
If you accuse others of having reprehensible motives, bring solid evidence or shut the fuck up.
maybe it's better to read ramparen's post as a possible explanation rather than an accusation :) btw. what should "solid evidence" for a claim like this look like? :)
Re: solid evidence: that's exactly the problem with mind-reading posts, isn't it? There isn't much that's even falsifiable. They're just based on the cynical belief that people can't genuinely care about things other than themselves. Cynicism is really tiresome because it's nothing more than a vague set of feelings that dresses itself up as an argument.
FWIW the closest thing to evidence I can think of would look like this: find people who say they are going childless because of climate change, ask how much they expect a child to contribute to climate change, then see if they engage in other nonessential activities that contribute to climate change by more than that amount. But even that doesn't work fully, because maybe they want a child less than they want to do those other activities, or maybe they aren't aware of how much those activities contribute to climate change. And that doesn't address the people who are worried about their children's QoL at all. It's just a dumb claim to make because he can't possibly know if it's true or false.
Is that really a reprehensible motive? No one should be obligated to dedicate 18+ years of labor to raising children. It's not reprehensible to just say "I don't want to."
I don't think this requires mind reading. People hide their true motives/reasons under a veil of socially acceptable arguments all the time, and "I won't have kids because of climate change" seems like a suspiciously pro-social excuse to avoid satisfying the social expectation to have kids.
Don’t tell people to “shut the fuck up.” You can express your point without personal insults.
Leaving aside the question of "reprehensible", people having internal motives that don't wholly match their external justifications is actually extremely common, probably more common than the inverse. Suggesting that this extremely common thing might be happening in some particular case shouldn't require any particularly high standard of evidence.
(I believe this community tends to take that sort of argument a lot more seriously than average.)
If people’s decisions are shaped by the subconscious interplay of many different reasons, then there are likely some people for whom this reason puts them over the edge, even if this number is not as large as the number of people who cite this reason in their official explanations.
Indeed, and "subconscious interplay" is stronger here than in many other things. The thing about having kids is it's a very weighty decision, and thoughtful people have no shortage of arguments with which to talk themselves out of it in this day and age. Do I keep living my life essentially as I have, or do I make this radical, irreversible change that will transform life in ways that I don't fully understand, requiring me to apparently sacrifice much of what has brought me enjoyment up to now?
The decision to become a dad is the best one I ever made, but I was a hair's breadth away from going the other way. So I believe there are a lot of people that will be tipped by one more argument against -- especially if, instead of yet one more argument against kids, they started to hear more arguments for them.
Your basic point is correct, and applies to lots of other things as well. It's tempting to say that nobody would decide not to have kids because X, or decide to risk pregnancy because Y, or ... . But the issue isn't X or Y making all of the difference for an average person but being enough to push someone already on the margin from just doing something to just not doing it or vice versa.
Thanks, and I would agree there. Specifically, it applies most of all to cases where many people are sitting close to the margin, and I think parenthood is one of those cases. By contrast, if the case was made that chopping one's head off with a guillotine was good for the environment -- eh, someone somewhere might be convinced to act on it (to your point, we should always be cautious about insisting on "zero people" on the margin), but I don't think too many people are close to the margin there.
The skeptics seem to be modeling parenthood as something about which it's easy to have a high degree of certainty, with few people on the margin, and I just don't think it works that way at present.
You say that as though it were a bad thing. Our world doesn’t need more people to begrudgingly assume that responsibility, it would rather be well served by people not prepared to raise children recognizing their limitations and not making children.
I think people shouldn't be pressured into making a decision on this issue one way or the other. I think there are probably a lot of people that would make good parents that have swallowed bad memes on this that lead them to think it would be unethical. I also think there are a lot of people that become parents kind of on autopilot, fulfilling the expectations of their parents and culture, and don't necessarily do a great job. I think both of these are suboptimal outcomes and people should make the decision to have kids based on whether they, themselves, properly understand the gravity, challenges, and rewards associated with the proposition.
I guess what I should have said more directly is, how large is the intersection in the venn diagram where one circle is the people you described in your first post (people using climate change as a "neat excuse to avoid the responsibility and limitations that being a parent brings into your life") and the other circle is people mature enough to be parents? I don't suspect it's a very large intersection.
Children are a very serious proposition and if the distance between a person having kids and not having kids is a "neat excuse" then I think that person probably shouldn't have kids.
So your plan to fix the world is to make some children and indoctrinate them so they vote correctly and otherwise affect the world in the desired direction? For a fraction of the cost you could do the same with existing young people not biologically related to you.
Let’s say this deplorable belief is currently held by 45% of the population. What’s the most effective way of not letting it rise to 50%, raise children to abhor it or persuade some existing adults?
Interestingly enough, it appears that the people most likely to make this decision are high income westerners for whom the burden of raising and educating a child is far less imposing than it is for most of the world's people. They also tend to vote Democrat and have left/liberal opinions (specifically about Climate Change as Scott mentions).
As someone who leans conservative, I can't say that I mind seeing Democrats intentionally reduce their own future numbers. It just seems specifically counter-productive in that a group is reducing their own reproduction in favor of individuals who are less prepared and less capable of raising a future generation, at least in terms of available resources.
Quite being so triggered about it, I say.
If you are so upset about university kids getting triggered about Shakespeare or something you need to bring it up on unrelated internet think-pieces, you might be a bit in your feelings.
Re: burden -- if you live in a high cost of living city and you're secular and college-educated, the opportunity cost of having children is extraordinary high. Childcare is very expensive, you're less likely to have family nearby who can help (and is young enough) housing is expensive (particularly if you're trying to manage two commutes and get your kids into schools that would be average in much of the country), managing two careers is stressful but quitting is hard to afford and has potentially huge lifetime costs, you are unlikely to have a peer group that validates doing this as of course the correct choice and provides an array of family-friendly social options. And what you're giving up (at least for awhile, and longer depending on your circumstances) is also just really, really fun, for a wide range of types of fun.
I agree with you on most of this. I would ask people who fit the typical left/progressive/liberal mindset and value city living and high income intellectual pursuits to really evaluate the truth in Emily's response here. Sure you have a higher level of education than most conservatives, and make a lot of money, but there are massive tradeoffs involved. Someone who wants to raise a family may in fact reject many tenets of the modern liberal/left and be making a rational decision on the merits.
As a parent with an almost two-year old. I would say that you trade some types of fun with new types of fun. Playing with a small child and having them hug you and teaching them things is very very fun, while getting drunk at dinner parties was starting to get old. There are some fun things we've given up doing as much for the time being, like as many ski trips and traveling, but in a few years' time, we can do those things again with children.
I think the tough thing for a lot of millennials is that we graduated into a bad economy that was making the shift to tech when a lot of us studied things like history and sociology and just when we are all getting out of debt and getting underway in our careers and having extra money to have fun, we are faced with the decision to have kids because we're all in our 30s. It's tough and I understand why people wait, but in retrospect, I kinda wish we had kids earlier and got through the phase of raising a young child when we were younger.
I don't dispute that kids are fun, but they're just as much fun in places with fewer restaurants or theatre options or whatever else you're into that cities provide. My point was about the relative opportunity costs being higher in some places/communities than others.
Climate change is one of a whole bunch of ways in which the world is getting worse and will continue to get worse. Meanwhile, as someone who has chosen not to have kids, I find myself under continuous pressure to justify myself - to give a full accounting of my reasons - not so that they can be debated, but so that they might be dismissed. After years of nagging, I have no energy left for debate - my reflex when asked "why don't you have kids" is to respond with the shortest combination of syllables that will shut down this line of conversation. "Climate change" works well for this purpose and has the advantage of also being part of the truth (I note the article linked to in the first paragraph mentions "having less opportunity than their parents" as a reason. Certainly it's hard to choose kids when you can't afford a home or basic necessities.) I know many others who find themselves in a similar place. I don't know how significant the effect is - it may be that I am in a small bubble and most people's experience is different - but I have to wonder whether the polling was done in a way likely to expose it or not.
>Climate change is one of a whole bunch of ways in which the world is getting worse and will continue to get worse
I just want you to know that, factually, you're probably incorrect on this by any reasonable definition of "worse." I also think that believing "the world is getting worse and going to get worse" is somewhat of a self-fulfilling prophecy for those who believe it, because it makes you think that life is mostly full of zero and negative sum games, which will cause you to act in zero and negative sum ways in the world and therefore miss out on positive-sum opportunities.
The main way in which it feels like the world is getting worse over the time I have been alive is a global shift away from cooperation and mutual support and towards individualism and self-interest; coupled more recently with a disturbing growth in apathy towards truth and fact. Basically, all the trends from "meditations on Moloch". Climate change, income inequality, Trump, Brexit, the antivax movement, lack of housing, collapsing healthcare systems - these are all symptoms of us losing the ability to cooperate to solve large problems and support the weakest in society, as was possible last century; and of being to keep the public informed and not apathetic - which may or may not be a thing we ever could do, that is less obvious. In any case, "better" is, of course, relative, and after the last two decades of election cycles I have become convinced that a majority - perhaps only a large pluriality, but between apathy and in-fighting that is enough - prefer the world to be this way. Thus, the longterm trend as I see it is towards boot in human face, forever; or, perhaps, some kind of revolution - though that outcome is, I feel, unlikely. In any case, neither of those feels like a world I would wish on someone. I used to be optimistic about new generations being able to improve things, but TBH I've lost that over the last two decades or so.
When you say the world is getting worse, do you mean the UK and US? If so, I might agree with you. If not, I completely disagree, because you neglected to mention: a billion people escaping poverty, the virtual eradication of polio, the banishment of famine from nearly every country, rapid rises in education and literacy rates, record low deaths due to warfare...
To be fair, my opinions largely are based on the UK and US; I have much more visibility there than elsewhere. (The various splinters of what used to be the soviet union are a separate and complex conversation - though I certainly don't believe they disprove the thesis).
The Chinese think things are getting better.
I think your natural human negativity bias is really cranked up here. None of the problems you listed are nearly as bad as how good the fact that billions of people have been lifted out of extreme poverty over the last half-century. Maybe you follow the news too much? I don't exactly want to get into a point-by-point refutation but I really feel that that's the only way to alleviate your concerns, which I do strongly believe are misplaced if you truly believe that "the world is getting worse and will continue to get worse."
>meditations on Moloch
I consider this piece to be about "why cooperation can be hard" not "the future is doomed!"
>Climate change
a real problem but, as Scott's piece lays out quite well, mostly causes life in the first world to head towards "not as good as it could have been" instead of "objectively worse than life was circa 2020."
>income inequality
I consider myself a progressive, but remain stupefied by how this is such a big issue. The only thing I can think of is that "envy is extremely powerful" but I really don't want to chalk up the majority of concern over income inequality to envy. I understand that high inequality can lead to political instability, but that means that income inequality is an instrumental concern, perhaps worth worrying about if Occupy Wall St was a more serious movement than it was. I haven't been convinced that income inequality per se is really bad. In order to make an income, one needs to be productive. There are inefficiencies in the market, to be sure, but in general no one is going to pay you a lot of money if you didn't provide value to them. Since the floor is set at $0, then higher income inequality means that someone is being more productive than anyone ever has been before. I consider this a good thing. I think that most people that get mad at me over this opinion are just attempting to justify their own envy, perhaps even to themselves. I also think we should build a more robust welfare state, but over time we have done that and I suspect in the future we will continue to make it better.
>Trump
Trump is/was bad but our institutions and system of government held up better than I would have expected them to so by the end of his presidency I actually updated towards a higher faith in our government.
>Brexit
I'm not an expert on European politics but this seems objectively not a big deal at all. The EU was meant to prevent intra-European war. War between the EU and the UK still seems quite inconceivable to my American perspective having traveled in Europe.
>the antivax movement
Has always been around, will always be around, and is probably smaller today than it ever was. Vaccine development, on the other hand, is objectively faster, safer, and better than it ever has been by a lot.
>lack of housing
A real problem, but mostly just an economic problem that, not to downplay it (I, too, rent in a HCOL city) but, does absolutely not rise to the level of "life is objectively worse" compared to 50 years ago. California has also made good political progress on this recently and as more boomers age out of the voting population it will become a higher salience issue in politics. The solution, although it takes time, is quite easy anyway: just build more housing.
>collapsing healthcare systems
I don't really know what this refers to other than the fact that our healthcare systems are under stress due to a current pandemic, which is about as big of a stress test as hospital systems could ever undergo. My sister is a nurse and, although she has had to work a ton over the past year, never once caught covid, which I think is a sign that our healthcare systems are extremely competent.
Overall I suspect that you are trapped in a very negatively-biased information ecosystem and I would recommend trying to get out of it, because I can't imagine that having such an outlook on life, especially if it isn't accurate (as I don't think it is), is good for your long-term mental wellbeing.
As I mentioned, I see these as *symptoms*. The common theme is that not only is cooperation hard, but over and over again we're *choosing not to try*; and hence the conclusion that the world is getting worse.
Climate change could be mitigated if we treated it as an actual immediate emergency - like we did the pandemic - where actually dealing with the problem takes precedence over the politics of looking good and dividing the pork, at least to the extent that significant chunks of the population *got vaccinated*; instead of even a fraction of this sort of concerted effort being applied to fixing how we generate energy, move stuff around etc we have political debates and outright denial.
Income inequality - "In order to make an income, one needs to be productive." Certainly in order for income to be made, *someone* needs to be productive, but the person making the income need not be the person being productive, and *this* is why income inequality is a valuable metric and ultimately leads to political instability: in a society that is much more productive than any before it, the net results of all the productivity are concentrated among just a few rentiers. This could be addressed by cooperating on a variety of policies, but the prevailing opinion is that we need less of that sort of thing, not more.
Trump - that he got elected shows a failure, not only of cooperation, but of the very desire to cooperate; and at the end we are left with a significant and growing portion of society that deliberately oppose truth and fact.
Brexit - here, a nation deliberately chose to end cooperation with their closest trading partner as part of a right-wing party's political game; in a game of prisoner's dilemma, a majority of the electorate chose defect over cooperate.
Lack of housing - would, as you say, be easy to fix *except we can't cooperate long enough to get it done*. It's been done in the past - but the social housing booms of mid-last-century would be impossible in the current political climate.
Collapsing healthcare systems - in the US, the healthcare system is essentially unusable by a large chunk of the population except for emergency treatment without risk of bankruptcy; in the UK, the majority party also want a system that works this way.
The world where things like eradicating polio, building social housing - or even just replacing existing social housing that is sold, choosing to work more closely with our neighbours instead of sacrificing our future well-being just to separate ourselves from them... that world seems very far away.
The overall pandemic response was, as you say, encouraging; and yet every day I commute I am surrounded by people who, when asked to choose between their comfort and the comfort of and risk to those around them, choose their own comfort; patriots, perhaps, who would do anything for their country except wear a mildly inconveniencing piece of cloth over their face. Every day there are more; that old utilitarian conundrum of dust specks in ten thousand people's eyes vs torture and death for a single person plays out every day, and society has spoken: torture and death it is, we cannot tolerate the dust specks.
Perhaps this helps clarify the pattern I see: less cooperation and less desire for cooperation over time.
It may be that you are right and I am trapped in an information bubble, or very likely as the other commenter suggested this is a uniquely US/UK-centric experience. However it is in this environment that I live and where any children would live.
In your opinion, is life getting worse for the median person in the US? It very clearly isn't for the median person in the world, but I'm less sure about the US.
No, I don't think so at all. I think there's an outrageous negativity bias in the media. I think this becomes pretty apparent if you delete all of your social media and stop consuming content from most news publications.
To take an example of one thing: air pollution almost anywhere in the US is at basically an all-time low since WW1, and will continue to decrease as we electrify vehicles and decommission coal plants. I think the impact of decreasing air pollution is incredibly underrated, and will basically make everyone smarter, healthier, more cooperative, more productive, and impose fewer costs on the healthcare system.
Crime has continued to decrease across the board since the 90s crime wave, with minor blips in certain areas which always make a lot of news. This may be partially due to steadily declining pollution, and other factors.
There are like a dozen stats like this that are extremely boring and are really forgettable because no one really needs to operationalize this information, so why bother remembering it? But it seems like you're familiar with many of these, considering that it is "very clear" to you that most of the world is getting better. Technology plods on, which in general improves everyone's lives. MRNA technology seems promising to cure malaria, it may also prove effective at various other diseases. Medicine in general looks extremely optimistic, mostly because the advances in data science over the past 20 years seem to have a ton of applications in things like genetics and drug-discovery. People in the US will generally be the first to experience these advances in technology.
I understand, very much, concerns over the political climate but I tend to think we're more discovering the shortcomings of the system that always existed rather than seeing things get worse. I think that if you stay plugged into social media, you might in some kind of trance to not realize all the great things going on. Some vlogger named Gabby Petito was killed by her boyfriend and oh my god what a tragedy but when you step back you realize what it means that a single person being murdered several months ago is the biggest news story going on right now, things actually must be pretty good.
Gøpbal income inequality has probably been declining at least since the late 1980s. This is because global income inequality = inequality between countries x inequality within countries. Although inequality within countries is on the rise most places, inequality between countries is on the decline, and the bulk of global income inequality is inequality between countries. The classic in this regard is Milanovic's 2013 article Global Income Inequality in Numbers.
The idea that billionaires produce wealth equal to what they deserve is absurd to me.
Well "deserve" is a loaded term, depends heavily on your normative ethics and/or metaphysics, and I didn't use it.
But outside of rare cases that become extremely publicized like Adam Neumann, no one gets handed a billion dollars. Someone like Jeff Bezos made many trades with many people, and the people he made trades with did so willingly. Elon Musk made many good trades with many people, could have comfortably retired filthy rich after PayPal but instead decided to bet all of his money and continue working 80+ hour weeks for the next 15 years, and today lives in a 300 sq ft mobile home.
As far as my opinion of "deserve," I think inheritance is morally wrong, and that there should be a 100% death tax, and we should call it a death tax. I think with that in place, we should feel comfortable praising the wealth of people who accomplish a lot. I don't think it makes sense to lump all billionaires in as one group, that makes it look like you're really operating on envy.
But was it "really possible" last century to support the weakest in society? Or do we remember the past mostly by the propaganda they told themselves? How much of your beliefs in this area are based on objective differences vs the difference of actually living through today's problems vs reading a summary of yesterday's problems?