Not sure those crises are real, tbh. Pensions is mostly about how we divide the pie and any demographic gap could be alleviated via immigration/robotics.
The tfr is an illusion as it implicitly assumes that a present day worker is not more effective than a worker now retired.
Imagine that tomorrow's generation is twice as productive as today's. Then clearly the fact that the age pyramid is more of a rectangle doesn't matter in and of itself. The issue will be to convince then workers to share the wealth with us/their parents/the retirees.
Robots help b/c they help maintain production levels with lower pop. As to people being too poor to afford robots/robots' products, it's again a question of sharing the pie.
Tax the robots owners and redistribute the gains would be an obvious way to go about it (via UBI or any other way)
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.
AR6 was quite clear that for 8 out of the 12 extremes it considered (including all kinds of storms, floods and two different kinds of drought) there was no measurable change. And thank goodness the impact of all the extremes has been dwindling for as long as such impacts have been measured!
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.
I think there's an element of the hedonic treadmill in these "People in the past lived such awful, miserable lives" kinds of argument. We tend to assume that people with less than us must be less happy, and because we're not generally very happy, that means that they must be really unhappy. In reality, though, this isn't the case: rather it's that we take our material comfort for granted, and so it doesn't make us feel any happier. If we lived in a society with fewer comforts, chances are we'd feel about as happy as we do now.
I don't think people would have regarded having children as immoral. People likely found the circumstances they are used to acceptable. Indeed, at some point in the future, a very advanced society may have no scarcity, disease or death; our society compared to that may be as miserable as the middle ages compared to us. But that doesn't mean it's wrong to have children in our present circumstances (and not just because we need to have descendants for a better future to exist).
However, I strongly disagree with the notion that dying is equivalent to never having existed, and thus it's good to have a child as long as your child won't be so miserable as to commit suicide. No, dying is very bad, in a way never existing isn't, as most of us have a very strong preference not to die. There is a level of misery in which most people wouldn't commit suicide, but such that IMO it's better not to create children into it.
"My broader problem with the second argument is that Scott hasn’t done a cost-benefit analysis; if you spent all the time and money and effort you spent having (and offsetting) a child, does Scott not think you would be able to change a single person’s mind about climate change? Also, I find the idea of having children so that they can be your ideological minions kind of gross. Neither does the world have some kind of shortage of climate scientists and engineers that could only be remedied by upper-middle-class people having children."
I agree that if you spend all the time you were going to spend raising children doing global warming activism, that would be better than having children. I don't think the people this post is addressing are planning to do this, so I didn't bring this up.
"Even though our children’s lives may be approximately the same as ours, it seems that the long-term future from climate change gets a lot worse."
Disagree. I expect the first-world contribution to climate change will stabilize within the next 70 years, based on progress so far and credibly-promised progress later.
"“1-2% of people changing their individual decisions will do basically nothing. What we actually need is concerted government action.” This is the standard global-warming denier argument and has been countered thousands of times (including in the EA community). "
I'm...not aware of these counters? I think there's a decision theoretic argument for doing things yourself, but it's a pretty weak one (eg I've done many things myself, and the promised universalizabilty where everyone then does these things hasn't come through). I think most of the work does have to be done by government action; the only case I can imagine where this turns out not to be true is an amazing moonshot research push by billionaires and other nonprofits, which your child also is not affecting.
I certainly think governments could facilitate the technological advances necessary to solve or mitigate climate change. But I don’t believe they are the most important institutional player. From a more decentralized direction, we have basic scientific research leading to breakthroughs in geothermal, fusion, extraction, etc. We also have businesses and entrepreneurs working to solve the various issues (trying to make a buck.)
If I was the President of the world, I probably would suggest a Manhattan project to create alternative clean energy and or to extract CO2. But absent my winning the coming election, my guess is that millions of people are working on it in a competitive, decentralized way already. The worst thing we could do is get in their way.
The initial Manhattan project did end up with us getting to alternative clean energy, though. Governments refusing to utilize it (especially in its newer, safer forms) is one of the reasons why climate change is an issue at all at this point. (Unless you mean renewables, in which case I have great news for you about breeder reactors!)
Exactly my reaction (although I expressed it in both a more abstract and more agressive way, I think). I wonder if this is not the first part of a two story piece illustrating the double standard for critical analysis of in-group/out-group theories....Or maybe this was more emotional and less analytic than most articles?
"Also, I find the idea of having children so that they can be your ideological minions kind of gross". Yep, this is also the thing that disturb me the most. Here-be-dragons, just look at israelo-Palestinian conflict if you want a painful real-life illustration...
1. It makes little sense to base decisions today on effects more than a century out, because the future is very uncertain. In my _Future Imperfect_ I described three different ways we could wipe out the human race in the next century, none of which involved either climate or nuclear weapons — for details see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8talvLDfow. If we avoid such and simply extrapolate what has been happening, in a century we will be much richer with much more advanced technology. We may have problems, but they are unlikely to be the same problems we are worrying about now.
2. I think all three of my children will, in different ways, make the world a better place. But that isn't why I wanted to have children.
I think my kids will make the world a better place. I mean, my other choices are that they'll make it a *worse* place, which would be pretty weird, or thinking they'll have no effect at all, which is also sort of strange.
So maybe you mean something else? Like, you haven't met parents who think their children improve the world by X% where X is a fairly big number? I would agree with that -- few among us think we're raising the next Einstein. But the idea that nobody thinks X > 0 at all seems....strange. Certainly not in agreement with the parents I know.
Maybe a better (because far less tainted by parental love... or blindness if you want to be nasty... Or darwinian optimisation if you want to be coldly scientific) question would be 'would the childrens of some unknown stranger would make the world a (very slightly) better place, or a (very slightly) worse one? It's reconciling the second belief with children desire and a radical effective altruism ideal that is difficult 😅
That was the question I tried to answer in a piece written for the population council almost fifty years ago. I concluded that the size of the effects, positive and negative, was too uncertain to know if the net was positive or negative.
Aaah here we can agree : the effect is uncertain and far away , but the individual benefit of being able to choose your favorite family size is huge. Frankly, the benefit of individual freedom, sense of control on his own life are often neglected in global altruistic cost/benefit analysis. Organised Altruism is often a mean of control, so much that one should think hard about which is the mean and which is the goal...
You know, the only way you can conclude the average new baby has a net negative effect is if you assume people are some kind of evil or ugly phenomenon, have done nothing but ruin Creation for the past 2 million years, and the universe will be better/more beautiful/more marvelous when our species finally dies out.
That's certainly a point of view, but it seems to me unnecessarily cranky and self-loathing. I'm comfortable with the notion that overall, averaged over its 50,000 year history to date, humanity has been a force for creative good in the universe, and has done marvelous and interesting things. It follows that the expected value of a new human life is positive, if only by a small amount. As I said below, there are no constraints on the value added by a particular new life -- it could be hugely positive, hugely negative, or anything in between -- but assuming it will be the average (slightly positive, enough to have brought us from poo-flinging short-lived filthy hooting primates to Mozart, Picasso, and the theory of quantum electrodynamics in 50,000 years) is a very rational assumption to make.
No, it is enough to think there is a finite pour to share among a growing set of invitee.... At one point, the invitee will be hungry and wonder why you invited so many of them. The counter argument is that the pie is in fact not finite, that every new invite bring his own food and on the end everyone will have more varied food the more people come and have fun... It's not a crazy idee and it's great merit of that it has been true in the past, probably multiple times. This may gives a lot of confidence it will be true in the future... But the problem is that it require continuous growth through continuous progress, and this belief is mainly shared between people not responsible for this process (economists, politician, or tech people on fields that are not their own) but not among tech people in their own field (with some exceptions, like IA). And from a personal point of view, it does not look like the pie is growing : progress seems much slower than what i would have guessed when young (Again, exception for IT), and socially it's even worse : for "protecting" the public, power centers (gouvernements, large companies and organizations) become more and more intrusive and controlling. So, even if it has been true in the past, I am not convinced it will continue. I am convinced when are right in pie shrinking, and that will not lead to a mad max scenario but to an effective dictature (end of the post WW2 freedom, which may have been an historical accident - GW, terrorism and covid crisis are the manifestation of what western society become in a shrinking pie context). At this point, i may regret it but I kind of wish for IA overlord, maybe it will be less bad than the coming human version
Sorry, I don't follow at all. That's the risk of arguing by analogy. What is the "pie" and what is the "pouring" and who is doing it? How does that relate to the pretty self-evident point I made that human beings have create a vast marvelous intricate array of fascinating artifacts and ideas, starting from sticks, dirt, stone, and the labor of their own hands?
Sorry, i typed on a phone and this is definitely not a good idea....pouring is pie, so there is nothing original in what I said: it's classic negative/positive/zer-sum games analysis: There is a global share of resources (economical, ecological, anything....the pie) to be allocated to all human beings, and adding one human have two effect: it increase the total amount of things to distribute (because, as you said, people produce things of values to other people - it grows the pie), but it also add one more human which want's his share. If one more guy makes the pie grow more than an average share, then increasing the number of people will benefit everybody. If not, it will reduce the standard of living of existing humans. You think on avergae, one human brings more than he consume. You were right in the past. I thing you are now wrong, probably at least since the seventies...
Sure it does. If that were generically true, then life today would be no better than it was in 40,000 BC. Is that plausible? If not, then it follows the net average effect of each additional human born since then is positive. Now, it may be some people have a gigantic positive effect and millions of others have a slight negative effect, or everyone has a modest effect, or any number of things in between. But either the average human has a positive effect, or else you believe life is no better -- or if you prefer there is no more good and beauty in the world -- today than it was 50,000 years ago, which seems silly.
So given the average effect is positive, why would I assume that my kid in particular is below average? That is unnecessarily pessimistic, so I assume he will have the average -- slightly positive -- effect, which is a sound empirical thing to do when you have no better data.
Yes, I believe a relatively small number of humans have an outsized effect via technological progress. Like Greg Clark, I view human history as mostly consisting of Malthusian stasis.
Well OK, fair enough. I'm just pointing out you are taking one more theory-based step than I am, that is, my assumptions are more cautiously empirical. Since I don't know anything about the distribution of contributions of people, nor where my kids fit in that spectrum, I do the simplest possible thing and assign them the average contribution level. Which is positive.
But you know, assigning them an expected effect of strictly zero is mathematically illogical. What you should do is assign them a probability of X% of having a contribution of zero (or negative if you're really pessimistic), and (100-X)% of having an Einstein/Alexander/Plato level of influence. And if you do that, and you use appropriate magnitudes of contribution in each multiplication, you will arrive at an average expected contribution -- which matches mine :)
This reasoning looks sound, but did you consider that maybe, increase of standard of living (SOL) and increase of population (POP) are correlated not because the former is caused by the later, but because they both are mostly factor of another variable, i.e. technical progress? If you agree, then the correlation betwen population and standard of living is no reason to believe more people will necessarily means better SOL? Yes, even if more people increase progress, this still does not imply that increase POP will increase SOL. It may, but it may not, it all depend how progress is linked to population and how SOL is linked to both population and progress. And I would not condemn Malthusians too fast because they were wrong in the seventies. They were right in other places and times, and looking at here and now, they may be right again. Look at housing prices (at least in western europe, I speak about what I know), and standard of living for median income (remove IT stuff, it's an outlier). And do the GW/terrorism/Covid scare only accidents, or a pattern in a global move back to population surveillance and control, one of the 2 possible outcomes of the end of the time of plenty (the other being mad-max style collapse - something I considered as a real possibility when younger but now found completely unrealistic in western and east-asian strong states)
Well but where does technical progress come from? From the minds of people. The more minds, the more progress, seems like a pretty basic correlation. Even if you argue progress comes from a tiny fraction of brilliant minds it's a *fraction* so the more people you have overall, the more brilliant minds.
I don't say the Mathusians are wrong. We are perfectly capable of destroying ourselves through failure to appreciate and deal constructively with limits, the same was as individuals we can kill ourselves by failing to look both ways before we cross the street. Our massed minds are a resource, not a guarantee, one which we can use effectively and wisely, or ineffectively, or even effectively and wickedly (i.e. we destroy ourselves with ingenious weapons).
My explanation for Europe is that it has become sclerotic, and innovation has dried up. So it *looks* like the limit of resources, because the innovation required to grow beyond those limits is being suppressed through malignant social trends. It's as if nobody had figured out drilling for oil when the forests were running out. Geez, we're going to run out of wood to burn soon, and what then? Well, had you discovered oil, the problem would be solved by innovation, but if for some reason the innovative spirit necessary has been stifled -- yeah, it looks like the limit is unassailable.
I don't mean to single out Europe by the way, I think the same thing is happening in the US. Innovation has dropped off a cliff (this is borne out in economic stats, by the way, e.g. the rate of new small business formation has declined considerably). Boldness and new stuff is less socially valued, consistency and equity is more socially valued. Being difference is frowned upon, hewing to the shibboleths more rewarded.
These things happen. The Romans lost their spirit of adventure and enterprise, too. There's no guarantee we won't slide gradually into another long period of stagnation and relative decline. I speak only of potential, not whether we will intelligently realize that potential.
I am very suspicious of this idea that more people means better solutions.
Let's say we need a better, cheaper solution for direct air capture of CO2. Somebody has a bright idea and gathers some investors (public or private). R&D commences.
Now what are the chances that the idea is a complete solution? Practically nil, right? Lots of trial and error happens. The final solution may bear little resemblance to the original idea.
From whence did the solution arise? From investment, R&D, and determination. Not because someone had a bright idea.
That process of investment and R&D could start tomorrow. No need for an idea. What's lacking is the determination. Another billion souls may or may not provide more determination.
I expect that the farther we look into the future, the more the negative effects of global warming will be more than counterbalanced by technological progress.
Moreover, the farther into the future, the more time humanity will have had to adapt to the effects of the warming. The most plausible negatives of global warming aren't that a warmer planet is inherently worse than a cooler planet, as much as that a warmer planet is worse (in some ways) for a humanity whose existing infrastructure and population distribution is adapted to the current or near-past climate. In 2100, I can imagine that the adaptations will be ongoing, and causing some disruptions. By 2200, I expect the adaptations to be mostly complete. (Compare: how much it would disrupt our economy if we had to rebuild many of the buildings that were standing by 1940 vs if we had to rebuild many of the buildings that were standing by 1840?)
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Would you rather live fifty years ago? A hundred years ago? By any measurable criterion I can think of, life in the U.S. and in the world on average is better, not worse.
For the world, take a look at the figures on the rate of extreme poverty.
Personally? I'm much better off now than I would have been with my life and job in my part of the world fifty years ago. But I am part of the 1%. People keep inexplicably voting to divert resources from themselves and towards me, and certainly I won't refrain from putting my hands under the money faucet when the money comes out. Nevertheless, I am unconvinced that my cleaner, or my friend who is a graphic designer, or my other friend who is a research scientist, or my little sister who is a nurse, or indeed my other friend who is a sysadmin, or any of my friends' or relatives' kids at all, would not have been better off at a time when purchasing a house was actually possible for people doing the kind of work they do at the ages they are.
I was an adult fifty years ago, and I think you are mistaken. You are focusing on one of multiple changes. And even on that one, home ownership rate at the moment is a little higher than it was in 1971, much higher than it was in 1921.
Two hundred years ago, we had actual slavery on every inhabited continent. One hundred years ago, we had a world war, and then another one a few years later. Is there a specific time period in the past where you think things were better than they are today?
I think the thing may be that it doesn't sound like you're necessarily prepared to believe them if they say they just don't want to stay home. There's this vibe that maybe you'd then want to interrogate them until they proved to your satisfaction that they weren't agorophobic.
Even if you and they both agree that they ARE agorophobic, what you write also gives me the feeling that you are the one who gets to decide whether that's a PROBLEM, that you won't accept "I'm agrophobic and I like being agorophobic. I want to stay home because I'm agorophobic and I like it that way.". Or more generally that you feel qualified to pass judgement on WHATEVER reason they may have.
That kind of help has some bad history behind it and a bad reputation.
People who make different personal choices than you aren't mentally ill and don't need your "help" to "mature". I think that you are a *very* immature and narcissistic person for not understanding this basic idea.
I think you don't really believe that "no one really does it because of climate change". You're just saying so to avoid legitimizing their beliefs or addressing their arguments.
Why would people need the excuse? I don't want children – largely because of the responsibility and limitations! – and I see no reason to make up some other reason for it. It's not what I want for my life and that's it.
When people have spoken to me about not having kids because of climate or, more frequently, because it feels like the world is spinning into disaster, they're people who want kids but are anxious about it for a variety of reasons. They'd be potentially persuaded by this article.
It strikes me as being something like the topic of taxation. You can't necessarily wag your finger at any specific individual for being unable to contribute, but if you want your country to not fall apart, then somebody has to do it.
I remember seeing an episode of a BBC comedy show a year or two ago where a woman was relating how some other woman advised her "you need a baby to make sure you have someone to look after you when you get old." "I'm sorry, isn't that the job of the HSE?" <cue raucous laughter> It apparently didn't occur to her that the HSE wasn't staffed and funded by martians, but would have to be run by doctors and funded by taxpayers who all needed to be gestated in wombs.
The usual left-wing dodge for this problem is "well, we can just import more migrants" (because of course exporting the duties and obligations of child-rearing to poor women in other countries is a totally progressive feminist thing to do, but set that aside for the moment.) The larger problem is that birthrates are trending toward below replacement on a global level, and there is no realistic way that the OECD is going to import 500 million migrants to make up for this kind of demographic shortfall.
So... the reason why people scrutinise the decision to not have kids more closely that other private decisions people make is because... it's not really a private decision. It's a choice with enormous external impacts on the wider society and it's not really coherent to demand certain rights and entitlements from that society (like access to a universal health service for the elderly) without recognising certain responsibilities and obligations toward that society (like raising a reasonable number of children.)
Seems weird to me that people should be obligated to go to such extreme measures as creating people that they secretly wish didn't exist in order to contribute to that. Anyway, the idea of having kids to keep society going instead of reversing aging or automating away drudgery reminds me of this:
"Seems weird to me that people should be obligated to go to such extreme measures as creating people that they secretly wish didn't exist in order to contribute to that"
Very few parents wish for their children not to exist once they've actually met them.
"the idea of having kids to keep society going instead of reversing aging or automating away drudgery"
I'm not reflexively opposed to either of those things, but it's simplistic to assume they won't create their own problems. (Radical longevity will create serious long-term problems with overpopulation unless you can drive birthrates down to zero, and many people have a psychological need to feel useful even if the task assigned might feel like drudgery at the time.)
Those are quite complicated topics. But I can say I'm somewhat skeptical that work meets a psychological need to feel useful for everybody. I would guess that only about two-thirds of people get that feeling from work.
I know this is random but I'm just re-reading this now... and I feel the need to say... you realize it's a bad idea for someone who doesn't want to have kids to have them just because of some vague theoretical statistical idea that they probably won't regret it right?
Like, imagine your kid actually asks "did you want to have me?" and you have to tell them, "no but I figured I'd probably be glad I had you once I did."
Look, I'm gonna be blunt about this- the fundamental liberal assumption that most people are rational actors capable of devising optimal life strategies for both themselves and society at large without any external traditions, guidance, incentives and constraints is patently false and needs to be abandoned. It's not so much expecting each generation to reinvent the wheel as it is like expecting them to reinvent the jet fighter.
The number of women who change their minds about wanting kids between the ages of 20 and 40 is sufficient proof of this by itself, given that, by age 40, it's often impossible to do anything about it. Yes, I imagine there is some non-zero risk of buyer's regret if you tell someone at 20 that will want kids and it turns out by 40 they still don't, but now have to shoulder the awful crushing burden of giving a damn about the next generation of the human species. But this should be weighed against the risk of loneliness and depression for 40-years olds who want a family and by that time can't have one. There is no risk-free strategy here.
To be clear, I am not opposed to making the process of child-rearing easier. Subsidising access to sperm banks, embryo selection and/or pre-natal genetic screening can improve the odds of a child being healthy and well-adjusted. Baby bonuses and changes to tax structure that favour fertility probably wouldn't hurt. So might boosting the incomes of young men for the sake of the 80% of women who prefer part-time work or staying at home and who might be looking for a husband to enable that. But there also need to be massive adjustments in cultural norms and attitudes, such as modern feminism dying in a fire and the same level of social stigma being applied to childless 6-figure-two-income yuppies that we might apply to chain smokers. Because it's not always just about you and your preferred lifestyle.
"The people who say otherwise are going against the majority of climatologists, climate models, and international bodies."
I think this is a bad argument for something, especially given the increasingly high reputational costs of publicly going against this consensus. What do you think based on your review of the evidence?
This is mostly a rhetorical post intended to convince people who are planning not to have kids because of climate change. I think these people trust the IPCC and so it's fair to use the IPCC's conclusions when talking to them without backing them up. If I were writing to try to convince global warming skeptics, I would be more careful about explaining why they should trust IPCC. I personally do trust IPCC but agree that it would be important to justify that if I was talking to people who might not.
For one thing, those who are not having kids due to climate change tend to have convictions that can help fight climate change, and since children usually inherit (or be deeply influenced by) their parents' convictions, those people not having kids are decreasing the amount of total beneficial convictions and increasing pressure on the other sources (e. g. arguing with people who don't have the beneficial convictions to win them over).
okay. Then you should have 2 extra kids to make up for me and my wife not wanting to make a huge personal sacrifice so that there are more people to vote blue no matter who or whatever
More kids = more growth = bigger pie for me to slice from.
Especially given that those considerate enough to decide against kids, have better odds of having kids that contribute strongly to growth if those kids do get the chance to exist
From my perspective, if someone made a decision to not have kids as a result of some calculation, and that calculation involved wrong data, I assume they would want to know.
If someone's decision to not have kids correlates with some trait (such as sensitivity or compassion), I am not going to pressure the individual to change their mind, but on a more general level, I will express my worries about the dysgenic effects of such decision. (For example, if intelligent people decide en masse not to have kids, it doesn't make much sense to sign up for cryonics... because it assumes that in the future someone will produce the futuristic science that can wake you up.)
People who are planning not to have kids due to climate change are concerned for the *kids* not for the *planet*. Also, people who don't want to have kids will generally lie about their reasons, because of people like you who will not mind their own reasons.
I am genuinely unsure how you missed this? You are generally a smart dude, but terrible at empathizing with people who don't hold your exact values, something I noticed from your other essays.
If you are so concerned about the Blue tribe reproducing, then have 2 extra kids to make up for me and my wife not making a huge personal sacrifice to do something that we don't want to do.
I don't think Scott thinks having as many kids as possible is a sane way to deal with the climate crisis, and doesn't state that anywhere in the post. It is, however, absolutely true that if the only reason you aren't having kids is the climate, there's probably a hole in your reasoning. If the reason you're not having kids is something else (like, you know, not wanting to spend 18 years of your life vesting huge amounts of resources in another creature) than your reasons remain sound.
But his post *is* an argument for having more kids.
But yes, I wasn't going to have kids anyways. Maybe if I was fantastically rich and could afford a full-time nanny and ensure them a perfect life. Why not? But in the real world, I can't image I would remotely enjoy it. I don't even like kids.
This post is not an argument for having more kids. It is pointing out that 'one' argument for not having kids may not be well thought through. There are many others.
"Nobody who really wants a kid should avoid having one because of climate-related concerns."
You don't seem to have fully read the article (Scott addresses your first sentence's objection in the first section of the essay). You certainly haven't fully understood it, as his motivation is pretty clearly not "being so concerned about the blue tribe reproducing".
Particularly for Scott's heavily EA audience, right? I'm paying $25k/yr just for daycare, which amounts to failing to save multiple lives *every year* through charitable donation just so I can have a kid. I guess you can argue that my kid is likely to become a net payer to EA causes, but I'm not sure the math on that works out. Actually, having typed that, I feel sure someone in EA has done the analysis already. Anyone have a good link?
From a utilitarian perspective, his kids on average will grow up to have a profoundly more positive impact on the world than kids in developing countries will. What you're describing appears to be a form of extremely narrow utilitarianism wherein people talk about various outcomes in utilitarian terms but use non-utilitarian metrics for judging between those outcomes i.e. that more people dying is worse because people dying is just bad.
As a fellow kid-haver I think it's worth pointing out here that $25k/yr is only a meaningful number for 2 or 3 years when the kid is very small, and the cost drops off exponentially from there. This may seem like nitpicking but the casual reader might get the sense that "daycare" costs $250,000 over a child's lifetime, instead of a fraction of that.
I agree, and I'll add that $25k sounds like maybe a San Fran or NYC price or something? Sending an infant to the best daycare in our flyover suburb costs around $10k/year, and it drops off from there. Though I suppose more of the audience might be in that $25k category.
I live in Colorado and most daycare centers around here are $1500-$2500/month. But there are also other options that are less. We take our kid to a woman who runs a daycare out of her house. We pay $55/day for 12 hours of care, about $880 per month.
Then there are informal babysitters who may charge as little as $10/hr because they are home with their own kid anyway.
The span of prices is huge and there seems to be huge market distortions going on that I haven't been able to figure out yet.
That's interesting, because where I live the top tier of places were all within maybe $50/month of each other when I checked. They would charge extra for 12 hours though (I think a standard day is 9 or 10 hours).
No idea know what the crappier daycare centers charge -- went to look at the one place that everyone told me is terrible and it doesn't even have a website.
I know a lot of people go with less formal arrangements though and I'm sure that has the potential to save money, though I don't know how much.
That sounds more reasonable to me. SF and NY have insane prices because of zoning regulations and delusional beliefs about the importance of 'good schools'.
As I've said before, I think that the healthiest way to do EA is to donate 10% of your money, then do whatever you want with the remaining 90%. Otherwise you will drive yourself crazy, not just when deciding to have kids but even when deciding to eg eat anything besides gruel.
One of the things people want to do with the remaining 90% of their money is have kids and pay for childcare, and I support this.
I feel like this does not pan out empirically. I know quite a few EA people who donate considerably more than that, either in raw money or by accepting EA adjacent jobs that probably pay way less than they're worth. These people have never struck me as ill-adjusted.
For an extreme example, it was a long time ago, but I think I recall a partnered pair on Less Wrong that mentioned they try to live off the cheapest somewhat healthy foods possible, spending barely a few pounds per day, don't leave themselves much of an discretionary income, and literally donate everything else.
People like this exist. They're not crazy. Their lifestyles are probably still nicer than those of many humans currently alive. In certain third world countries, humans live in conditions considerably worse than this, and yet they're not going crazy over it en masse.
Comparing the behaviour of these wonderful people to mine, it would be the height of hypocrisy for me as an EA not to admit that they're the ones who are doing it right. They are morally better people than I am.
The reason I don't donate more isn't that doing so would drive me crazy, it's that I'm so incredibly tribal and selfish that my obscene first world luxuries weigh as heavily as children dying of malaria and the fate of all sapience in our future light cone in my mind.
I'm not saying that the 10% target isn't what we should push for in the marketing. It seems well suited for that purpose.
But if someone donates more than that, I don't think this is an indication that they're crazy and don't have their life under control. I think it's wonderful.
In econ undergrad one of the concepts in our intro classes was the two-part tariff, in which a seller sets one price to get some money from a large portion of the market and then another higher price to get large amounts of money from a small portion of the market. I'm not sure that it would be easy to do, but one might imagine a post saying "if you still feel guilty after donating 10% of your income then donate 10% more until you feel better."
But what if you're the person reading the EA sermon and wondering why you aren't being inveighed against harder? If you're in the 10% of people who could be convinced to spend more than 10% of their income, it seems like you should allow yourself to be convinced to do so. Also, even if you can't imagine spending more than 10% of your income, what are the chances that reading more about EA thought convinced you to do so anyways? From the perspective of a concerned reader it seems like giving up when there are still higher moral planes in sight is wrong.
I'm not sure the math works out on saving kids in developing nations, as grotesque as that may sound. What these countries, not to mention the rest of world, desperately need is not more people.
As a Third-Worlder this feels to me insane as well. Cannot every single person inside the US see the seething, teeming masses of people outside of your country yearning to get in? Crossing the border in such numbers sp that literal walls across the desert have to be built? Risking persecution, jail, deportation? People paying thousands of dollars to fake-marry a US citizen for a chance to move? The Green card lottery?
So are people in every single less rich, less developed, more unequal country not supposed to have kids as well?
"So are people in every single less rich, less developed, more unequal country not supposed to have kids as well?"
That's exactly it: if the developing world wants to have the same lifestyle as the first world, it's just not doable. Westerners don't want to give up their cushy lives, so there have to be a lot fewer of the aspiring masses around. "I'm not having kids for the sake of the planet" sounds lovely, but it's not so lovely when you're living a lifestyle that can raise 400K for investment apart from the income you need to live on over your career. That money comes from *someplace* and it represents consumption of resources, the resources that the entire planet is competing for. For someone to have the kind of life where they can have that kind of income stream, someone else - a lot of someone elses -in other parts have to make sacrifices.
No, income (resulting from capitalism) represents value that you are providing to others. This is not simply generated out of thin air, where we only need to decide who gets to spend it.
It's not that simple, money isn't the same thing as utility/value. Every new person contributes to both supply and demand, and while supply usually makes others better off, demand (consuption) doesn't. You can the dating market as an example - introducing a new man into the dating market makes all women better off, but it makes other men worse off. So in a market already "oversaturated" with men, you could plausibly have the situation that a new man has a net negative impact on the dating population.
There is a bit of truth in this, but also a bit of "someone other than me should take care of the problems".
Imagine two societies: in one of them, middle class donates to EA causes, in the other, middle class does not donate to EA. Which society will have more billionaires donating to EA?
My assumption is that the billionaires are more likely to do it if someone else does it, too. First, because people copy each other. Second, because some of those billionaires may come from a middle-class background and keep the habit.
The person who can set aside 400K is typically going to pay more taxes than is spend on them by the government, so their existence will typically enable more non-productive consumption & their own consumption will be below production.
Of course, this is not the only thing you can look at. There are also all kinds of positive and negative side effects of consumption and production.
I am surely somewhat overgeneralizing, but I think I'm still mostly right wrt Marxists.
I believe Marx wrote that a product's value is a result of the labor put into it. But that doesn't seem to operationalize in any way other than to argue that the rightful owner of a product is the laborer. Otherwise, a price system would still be essential to any tracking of resource allocation, and once you grant that the material inputs to production have prices that must be tracked, it starts to look a lot like capitalism again.
I actual fact, the developing world is rapidly getting richer, and catching up with the developed world. It'll take a generation or two to complete, and I suppose trends can change, but that is what is happening across the planet.
Here is the share of the global economy by assorted countries in 1980 and 2018[1]:
US: 21% (1980) 21% (2018)
Japan: 8% (1980) 5% (2018)
Germany: 7% (1980) 4% (2018)
Brazil: 1.7% (1980) 1.9% (2018)
China: 1.4% (1980) 14% (2018)
Nigeria: 0.47% (1980) 0.40% (2018)
Bangladesh: 0.13% (1980) 0.28% (2018)
Basically, except for however you say Wirtschaftswunder in Chinese, very little has changed in the past 40 years. To be sure, the average wealth of Nigeria today is considerably better than it was 40 years ago, but *relative* to the wealthiest nations, nothing much has changed.
Well not deliberately, at least. I just picked the US and China, for obvious reasons, then an Asian First World nation (Japan, as it turned out, but I could've picked S. Korea I guess), then a famously poor and large Asian (Bangladesh) and African (Nigeria) country. If you think there's a better selection, by all means propose it.
I mean, that's not a fair summary of that data. There are 3 developed countries on that list, and their GDP share changed by 0%, -37% and -43%. Those are some pretty big changes for Japan and Germany, and a notable reduction (17%) in the total share of the three developed countries.
On the other hand, the 4 developing countries increased by 12%, 900%, -17.5% and 115% (and their total increased by 348%, which is dominated by china, as you said.)
Overall, I'd say that this data is really compatible with LarsP's assertion that the developing world is catching up. The share of the developed countries is diminishing by a lot, and the share by the developing countries has increased.
I gave you the link at the bottom so you can go pick a representative sample for yourself. But yeah I think it's fair. The relative changes are pretty unimportant here, because for anyone other than the big heavyweights the absolute numbers are tiny, and who knows whether the difference between 1980 and 2018 is even accurately measureable?
My main points are:
1. The US consumed 1/5 of global GDP 40 years ago, and it still does.
2. China, wow!
3. I rather suspect because the percents total to 100, China's surge came at the expense of Europe and Japan, which explains those decreases -- but even so, those decreases are not enough to knock Europe out of roughly the same positions they were in 40 years ago.
4. Brazil was a small fraction of the world economy then, it still is.
5. Nigeria and Bangladesh, both very large Third World Countries, had a miniscule slice of the world GDP then, and they do now, 40 years later. If you want argue their crumbs are 50% bigger, be my guest, but the idea that they're going to be "catching up" any time this (or the next) generation is clearly absurd.
Is percent of the world economy a good way to view whether they are rapidly getting richer? If the US and India are both growing quickly, India will see huge gains in basic standard of living, while the US will see modest gains to standard of living and some previously impossible things (including a social safety net, but also a tech industry).
India went from 1.37% to 2.74%, approximately double their share of the global economy, while the global economy grew significantly as well. Worldwide per capita GDP was just over $2,000 in 1980, but was almost $11,000 in 2018. Real wealth for Indians grew 10X over 40 years. I would take that as LarsP being correct. Some (China!) obviously grew much faster, while others grew much slower. Overall, the developing world is catching up with the West, if slowly, but more importantly is seeing huge gains in absolute wealth.
No, of course not, and I would actually agree they are rapidly getting richer. But the question was not absolute status, but relative, the argument was they were "catching up" -- which means they are getting richer *faster* than the First World. For that purpose, the relative share of the GDP does indeed matter.
Put it this way: the "poor" in the United States right now are fabulously rich compared to the poor of the 15th century, right? Probably even compared to the nobility of the 15th century, in absolute terms (food supply, entertainment, travel possibilities, widgetry, creature comforts). But we don't call them "rich" because it's their *relative* situation compared to everyone else that matters. Same thing here. Nigeria is richer than it was, in absolute terms, but in relative terms -- nope, not really. No evidence I can see of any "catching up" beyond NGO's typical cheery blather, only matched by the optimists who see peace in the Middle East Real Soon Now.
American GDP has grown despite our falling consumption of material resources. Becoming a rich country is basically a matter of accumulating human resources, and human resources are largely unconnected from any specific resource costs. Technology will continue to increase human wealth while decreasing the resource intensity of production. Development isn't a straightforward path, but it's unlikely that the developing countries of today will face as much pollution and resource consumption as did the previous generation of industrializing Asian/PacRim countries.
"That money comes from *someplace* and it represents consumption of resources, the resources that the entire planet is competing for"
Actually... I would argue that the net effect of first-world resource consumption has been enormously positive for the poorer countries of the world, given that many of the poorest nations have economies that are largely dependent on commodity exports (from agriculture, lumber, mining, etc.) If the richer nations of the world were to all adopt carbon-neutral minimalist lifestyles tomorrow, the economies of Africa and the Middle East would mostly collapse (with, y'know, minor side-effects like mass starvation and civil war.)
I can agree in the abstract that consumption for consumption's sake is a pretty perverse way to measure social progress and in a perfect world we'd find other ways to fund the development of the global south, but... as it stands it turns out that trickle-down-economics does make a certain sense at the global level.
But if that life was the life you had had till now, would you feel that way? Impossible to be sure, perhaps, but the way things usually play out suggests that someone living that life is less intimidated by it than we Westerners are, and more hopeful about obtaining a better life for their children one way or another. Hope springs eternal, realistic or not. Sometimes I think our psychological problem, here in the West, is that we've made it to where everyone else wants to be and found we're nonetheless capable of being deeply unhappy, and the idea that climbing higher would fulfill us becomes less and less believable... thus we have less hope.
It is true that there are lots of them, and yet many of them are also operating on extremely false ideas of what it will be like here, and seem to think everyone in the US is rich and lives like what they see in American movies/TV/cultural products. I have known plenty of immigrants who came here and were *extremely* disappointed at the reality, and also talk constantly at how cold, individualistic, materialistic, non-social Americans are.
Is it better to be a person of standing and status, embedded in a community, in a place with a lower standard of living, or a total no one at the bottom of society in a rich country? Not so sure for most people it's the latter.
Last, I think it's clear that absolute wealth and living standards (rather than relative wealth or sense of increasing standards), has a very weak correlation with sense of well being and happiness. I agree that living standards in the US, even for poor people, are amazing now. Yet the current crop of youngsters seem to be more miserable than ever.
Within the US I made the choice to live in a much smaller community and make a lot less money in order to enjoy what I consider the better parts of life. When I hear rich people (even upper middle class as with many programmers who frequent this blog) talk about their lives, they are often devoid of family and living space. I have an abundance of both, at the cost of making 30-40% of what I could be making in various cities. On the other hand, I can afford to buy a nice house in the suburbs on a single income while my wife takes care of the kids, the house, and connecting us with the community more.
I am saddened when I hear of a family where both parents work, the kids are being raised by a daycare for most of their awake time, and the family feels like they are barely making ends meet - despite making $200k+.
These people may be disappointed in how it worked out for them, but in many many cases their children have far higher upward mobility and opportunity than they would in their parents' home country. Look at Americans of Indian descent. They are one of the most successful groups in the US, and while there is a selection bias of who from Indian comes to and becomes successful in the US, there is no shortage of stories of kids whose parents owned a restaurant or worked in a convenience store who have gone on to become upper middle-class in one of the richest nations on earth.
If those immigrants were childless, then maybe they would have been better off staying in their home country and being in a community of people they felt more connected with. Maybe somewhat ironically, in their home community they would probably be more pressured to marry and have a family than they would in the US.
I would actually agree there are still a couple of Third-World nations that could stand to trim their fertility rates somewhat, but birthrates are actually declining toward sub-replacement at a global level.
I think all those things are pretty manageable. I guess it depends on where your live though. My kids shared a bedroom until the oldest was in middle school so we could have managed with a small two bed room house or apartment (my mother in a family of 3 girls grew up in 1500 sq ft home). And at least in my area/state public school is just fine for both primary school and college. If you want to go really cheap on schooling you can do two years of community college before transferring to State U.
Day care is more of a challenge, but lots of people manage on one income. My wife planned to stay at home once our kids were born but her career was going so well that we decided that she should keep working. Our philosophy was even if we spent 100% of her after tax salary on childcare before the kids were in school we would come out ahead in the long run.
And like Bryan Caplan has written about, most of the cost of having kids is totally self imposed by doing things that don't make much of a difference but everyone thinks you have to do.
I agree it's manageable. But not everyone's goal is a "manageable" life. I've noticed the daunting notion of meeting these expenses, living further from work in a less-nice neighborhood, living with less space, putting kids in less-good schools, etc. has turned some people I know away from having kids (or from having more kids). It makes some sense.
Yeah everyone has their own priorities. I just think the tradeoffs are often exaggerated and the payoff to having kids is hard to imagine until you have them.
"the benefit seems very fuzzy, unpredictable and unquantifiable"
Did you grow up in an orphanage? If you have experience being in a family, knowing your own parents, grandparents, etc... is it really so speculative??
Lots of people do not particularly enjoy their families. I know plenty of people that don't even speak to their family members, often for what seem to me to be petty reasons. Don't imagine that this is always because of abuse or some serious reason...some people just don't particularly like or get along with or have fun with their family members, for no reason other than just having incompatible personality types.
I've always been curious about the personality dimension of caring a lot about family, as this seems to be something varies a lot, person to person. But I've never seen research on it. I've known so many people who say things like that they don't like kids until they met *their* niece or nephew or kid or whatever, like merely being related somehow opened some new door of caring and empathy. Honestly I don't feel that way at all, I've never cared more or less about people related to me than people who aren't.
There is no benefit, if you mean like a return on investment or something. Children are a net negative to your lifespan, your fitness, your economics, and the amount of gray hair you have and how early you get it. They're not a consumer good, or investment, at all.
Children are a work project. They're something you do, like build an airplane by hand, create a work of art, climb Kilimanjaro. It's a question of what you want to *do* in your brief allotment of threescore years and ten before you go back to the eternal darkness.
Sure, you want to enjoy yourself a bunch, but most people have goals other than sheer maximization of sensual pleasure -- they want to accomplish something, make a mark, build something that will endure beyond them, that sort of thing. Bearing and rearing kids, sending emissaries to the future that you have personally trained from birth, is one such project.
Obviously not for everybody, any more than climbing Kilimanjaro is, but it's attractive to a lot of people because it's about the only situation in ordinary life in which you would be trusted with the complete training of a human being. An awesome responsibility, and power, and you don't need to pass a license test* or work your way up to a corner office or be fabulously rich to do it. It will, however, cost you most of your nonworking hours, a substantial chunk of your income, and a great deal of worry at times.
I wonder how long it will be before social services gets called on poorer people for "abusing" their children by requiring them to share a bedroom.
Plenty of things that were normal when I was growing up are already "abusive", such as (gasp) requiring your children to walk to school rather than driving them there. Not coincidentally, living up to the new requirements tends to increase parental costs.
Wait is kids walking to school counted as abuse? A quick google shows a lot of posts about anti-vaxxers verbally assaulting mask wearing children walking to school but that's pretty much it.
Read up on the work by Lenore Skenazy, she documents a number of circumstances where, for example, the parent has their child walk to school and the parent is fined for child endangerment.
As a result of these incidents and her work a number of states are passing "free range parenting" laws that state it is not child abuse for a parent to do a number of things based on the parent's assessment of the child's maturity and the risk of the situation.
My impression is that in practice the culturally middle class investigators have great difficulty seeing abuse from people like themselves, whether or not it's present, but find it quite easy to see abuse among people who can't afford a culturally (and financially) middle class lifestyle.
FWIW, a distant acquaintance of mine just got given a choice between relinquishing custody to her ex, if he'd take the child, or giving the child up to social services. I don't know all the details, but this was precipitated by the child being injured in some way that required a cast. I have zero idea whether or not the acquaintance was in fact negligent or worse. But these things do happen, and the one thing I do know is that she's poor. The acquaintance and her ex are both in the USA, in different states.
Possibly relevant: at least half my elementary/middle school classmates had at least one broken bone before we all reached high school, without AFAIK anyone being investigated for abuse. But this was a different era and a different country; also we were attending a private school, i.e. most of our parents had above average income/wealth.
My impression is exactly the opposite. Middle-class parents are hounded and harassed by CPS for the tiniest things. Meanwhile, lower-class parents are beating and abusing their kids and CPS does nothing. I have heard stories of children killed by abusive parents and there are facts like "CPS was ordered not to visit the household because of the risk of harm to the investigator"!!
Is it possible that CPS simply acts randomly -- often does not act at all, then at a random occassion horribly overreacts -- so the stories of both kind can be simultaneously true?
If "CPS was ordered not to visit the household because of the risk of harm to the investigator" is true and common then it turns out that being sufficiently violent can be an efficient strategy for child abusers.
I just find it fascinating that somehow our ancestors going back to the literal Stone Age had children in much worse circumstances. The counterargument of no birth control notwithstand - birth control has actually existed since before Christ, including one plant harvested to extinction for that very reason - it's just curious that modern folks place such a premium on comfort.
That said, not sure I want to encourage people who are going to treat their kids with contempt to procreate. Quite the dilemma.
You're committing the survivors' fallacy, plenty of people through history no doubt saw the immense suffering the world and refused to have kids, the fundamental insight of anti-natalism is pretty simple to derive for any mind reasonably attentive to the problem of evil. Maybe not stone age denizens, but at least one arabic philosopher in the 1200s or so lived and died by anti-natalism, so it couldn't be that much of a modern philosophy.
Your ancestors did have kids, but that doesn't say anything about the attitudes of all people who lived in their times, only them. Just like how in, say, the 25th century, descendents of current natalists will scoff at the anti-natalists of their time and remind them that "our ancestors in the 21st had kids despite everything". That's indeed true, but it ignores all the 21st century anti-natalists who were affected by the "everything" and didn't have children, saving countless millions of their progeny.
The thing about anti-natalism is that the lives saved by it were never born in the first place, they exist solely as brain patterns in the mind of their would-be parent who considered what world they would live in and decided not to have them, so there is no monument or observable effects to its decision. But that's not a problem, after all there is no monument to those who prevented wars or dismantled bombs, they prevented the disaster before it happened and thus it never happened, not surprising.
I'm really not seeing any fallacies in what I said. I pointed out that
1) we all exist in order to be having this conversation, and that involved a lot of people implicitly or explicitly wanting at least some kids
2) birth control has in fact been in existence and known to people for millennia, and
[implied] 3) there has been no distinct widespread anti-natal movement in the past.
If your argument is that there has in fact been [3] an anti-natal movement of significance I'm curious to hear about it. Rome fell in part because they weren't procreating enough but the modern anti-natal movement centers on ills to the planet, the individuals involved or both, concepts which as recently as in my parents' lifetimes would have been seen as ridiculous even in a more modern, less religious American society much less the overwhelming God-centered (however you'd like to define God/gods) ones of the past.
If anything, it sounds like the fallacy committed is Argument From Silence.
"Then I counted as lucky those who die young rather than those who die old, but luckier than both are those who are not born, who have not seen the evil that is done under the sun." Ecclesiastes 4: 2 -3 (quoted from memory)
It doesn't seem like there was any sizable anti-natal movement before modernity. For those who were anti-natalist, they probably didn't anticipate the industrial revolution and its consequences and thus underestimated how good things would be for their descendants.
It also seems to be the case that people have fewer children at higher standards of living and more at lower standards of living. Anti-natalism, like suicide, seems to crop up mostly among the affluent and among the literally-starving-to-death poor. It seems like most other moral actions have a much stronger relationship between expected utilitarian benefit and how likely people are to do them.
I have a hard time understanding how anyone can impute another person's utilitarian value as less than zero (except maybe for people with specific and uncommon diseases). For one it seems hard to draw a line where the vast majority of human lives haven't been negatives. For another it seems like that would license you to kill very large swathes of people if you thought their lives were negatives. I'm sure that antinatalists have a neat explanation of how killing people is wrong but convincing people not to have kids isn't, but the moral weight of the two actions seems more similar than different and I don't clearly see why one would be permissable and not another.
I for my part accept the repugnant conclusion and simply say that all human lives that have been lived up until this point have been valuable for creating the artistic, cultural, and academic cornucopia that has been passed down to us.
I don't know whether it's true, but Germaine Greer's _Sex and Destiny_ says that human societies are like candles. Sub-fertile elites burning themselves away at the top and drawing lower status fertile people up into the elite.
Even if they are, an article challenging this reason is worthwhile.
Personally, my belief is the most important cause of declining birthrates is being in school from age 18 to 23. It seems like people's urges to have children are strongest around that age and in the early 30s. Since having kids during uni effectively puts your education on hold, it seems prudent to put off kids until later. When later comes, the urges aren't nearly as strong.
I've noticed some people don't like this theory as it implies we are animals like any other.
I don't plan on having children ever, and not because of climate change, so may I go on a little tangent here?
You make an interesting point here that the 60 ton carbon cost per child is not actually calculated only for the child, but for their descendants too. I didn't know that.
So does it mean that not having children is NOT the best decision one can make, in an environmental sense? I always thought deciding not having kids had more impact than deciding to recycle, or to use public transport etc.
It probably still comes out ahead of recycling, which may well be worse for the environment (lots of energy required to turn plastic back into new plastic, even assuming that it doesn't accidently end up in the ocean while on the way to the recycling plant in Malaysia), but it's hard to really know since we're comparing current life choices to hypothetical future life choices in a (presumably) more environmentally friendly economy.
Recycling glass, recycling aluminum, recycling cardboard, and recycling plastic probably work out very differently. I would thing the first two are very good, and cardboard often good, but plastic seems bad.
Definitely agree that "it depends", aluminium and other metals recycle very well (the way you can tell is that people will pay money for scrap metal), and broken glass is a pretty good substitute for sand. Not sure on paper and cardboard, but I think it's generally easier to work with than turning wood into paper, although there's a loss of quality every time (which isn't too much of a problem since there are many uses for lower grades, it just can't be done endlessly). It's very hard to find any good information on this though, because it's just assumed that recycling = good.
I am increasingly concerned that plastic recycling (or at least, failed attempts to get people in Asia to do it for us) may actually have done more damage to the environment than just burying it in a hole.
My understanding is that recycling glass is a debacle. Some types of glass you can't recycle at all so they just get landfilled (which of course is fine, in the U.S.). The other types are extremely resource intensive to recycle, much moreso than just creating new glass.
This is true. Some types of glass are worth recycling, if you can gather enough of it that has a low enough processing cost. Glass is pretty cheap to make from raw materials, though, so anything that raises the cost of recycling (including potentially residential collection, but especially impurities) makes it cost prohibitive pretty quickly.
I actually tried to estimate the net externality from having a child almost fifty years ago, back before climate change worries but at a time when the orthodoxy was that population growth was a terrible problem. I was unable to sign the sum.
Current climate hysteria looks a lot less persuasive for those of us who observed the last round, when population growth was going to destroy the world, with Ehrlich seriously claiming that it was already too late to prevent mass famine happening in the 1970's, with hundred of millions dying. That was an extreme view but taken seriously as within the range of the then current orthodoxy, an orthodoxy pushed with at least as much confidence as this one.
What actually happened since was the precise opposite of the prediction.
I agree with this. I used to argue with my father about the same thing. Now, 35 years later, every single modelled projection of doom has been seriously, almost comically wrong, and I find myself arguing with my children about the likelihood of the apocalypse.
Or the year after that. Etc. If you don't peg the limit of your prediction, then *eventually* you might be right. Or if you don't count your failed predictions and only the correct prediction, you will be right.
Really? Previous climate predictions held that there would be routine summer sea ice in the arctic until the 2050s. Based on observations, this estimate has been brought forward by a couple of decades. Even this summer scientists were surprised by the ferocity of the US west coast heat waves, and are revising their models to incorporate this new (and more pessimistic) data.
In 2007, Tim Flannery stated unequivocally that not only would rainfall be reduced by 20% across Australia, but what rain did fall wouldn’t reach and fill dams because the ground would be so dry due to elevated temperatures. Four years later multiple dams overflowed and dozens of people were killed in huge floods. This too was blamed on climate change despite the floods being well within historical limits. He also predicted Perth would become a ghost metropolis, but the population has increased by a third since he said that, and the Swan River is still flowing serenely through the city and all the swimming pools are full.
Some predictions will inevitably be proven correct. Most have not been. Polar bear numbers are increasing, the Northwest Passage remains closed, one million climate refugees have not eventuated, S Pacific atolls are growing rather than being flooded, there has been a reduction rather than growth in deaths from tropical diseases, wildfires are actually decreasing in number and intensity, cyclones and hurricanes are causing less damage per capita, floods kill less people.
Here’s a prediction: There will be a measurable increase in excess deaths due to cold in Europe this winter. This can be attributed to power shortages arising from over reliance on wind and solar causing price inflation for traditional fuels used for heating. All of this is happening while Germany’s CO2 emissions are rising due to their idiotic move away from nuclear power. All of that is due to the government failing to resist environmental activism over the last decade.
Climate emergency mitigation policies will be responsible for more deaths than climate change ever will. Unfortunately the terms of the discussion are now so morally warped that the answer is just to do more stupid stuff faster (Stop fracking! Close nuclear plants! Burn wood pellets! Subsidise electric cars!) and, by the way, stop having children.
Whenever I see something argued using only one hand, I, as an economist, always have to wonder about the other hand. What would the missing child whose absence saved the world from 60 tons of carbon cost in terms of how the child might have improved the world? It seems wrong to me to argue certain costs when the benefits are uncertain. Makes the costs look less certain.
I agree and think looking at only costs and not benefits is a mistake and makes the argument for having children for people in rich countries weaker than it should be. People looking at the sea level rise in SF and NYC are probably ignoring what may happen in Bangladesh in 100 years. If we increase the population in the US (even Texas) through more births or immigration from countries with lower economic growth that means higher US and world GDP, more money and more minds to work on bringing solutions like fracking tech, for both natural gas as a coal substitute ( which has been a large cause of American CO2 emissions reductions as well as advanced geothermal, carbon capture, new nuclear power generation tech and possibly future dike building robots, geo-forming and as yet unimagined technology.
Humans are not a problem, they are problem solvers. The IPCC also focus only on problems and map out current emission trends and assume we will not have the will or wherewithal to reduce or eliminate them before they overwhelm us. We need more wealth and brainpower not less. If the proverbial frog’s pot is warming slow enough then maybe there’s time to have many tadpoles and maybe displace enough water to spillover and put out the fire.
I am not one of the people you asked, but I think the answer might very well be "humanity". I don't think anyone seriously believes that any such campaign will stop everyone from having children; the point is to reduce the increase in population, not end the human race.
With the caveat that I am not one of those people: some of them want to save the planet for the nonhuman life that lives on it, sometimes valuing that much more than human civilization.
And yet human population keeps concentrating itself in cities and wilding the rest of the world. Hard to say that population growth is bad for nonhuman life.
Wilding the rest of the world with how much pollution produced by those cities?
Plus, food production doesn't take place in cities, and it would be interesting for someone to run the numbers on how environmentally bad agriculture is to feed our current or an even greater population.
Good point. I mean, unless we're talking about people in the past, e.g. those dumbasses who allowed chattel slavery to exist in the United States for 85 years until it took 500,000 lives to put an end to it and we're *still* paying for it. Didn't those fools understand they were living in the past, and should be much more concerned about our lives now (which are of course not putative) than their lives then? Yeesh.
I don't mean that the people who will be alive in 100 years should matter less than we do
(that might not be inconcevable because of hyperbolic discounting but that's not what I'm talking about)
I'm saying that someone not being born is not as bad as someone dying.
And so, protecting living people is more valuable than making new lives.
I feel like that's what we talk about when we distinguish between murder and abortion early in the pregnancy (which most people here do I'm assuming)
Or even contraception
About the word "putative" maybe I misused it (not a native speaker)
I meant to refer to "lives who might theoretically exist in the future of might theoretically have existed in the past" not to "lives that will exist in the future" or "lives that did exist in the past"
Also, would you care to explain the link with slavery? I don't get it
Willingness to take ethical arguments seriously and make sacrifices according to their conclusions is not a trait I want purged from the gene pool. (Though, this is just for the sake of argument. In practice, the time scales involved here are too small to have an evolutionary impact before this particular ethical argument is made irrelevant one way or another.)
Actually, that might be a good thing. The amount of horror and harm that humans have piled up when they do massive things for philosophical or soi-disant ethical reasons is disturbing. Stalin thought he was doing great and necessary things for the Workers of the World when he starved 30 million Ukrainians during the Holodomor. Treblinka was a way to rid the world of irredeemable evil, according to its planners. We have people today who would cheerfully nuke Beijing because they think it is a source of malign moral influence, and not because there is any direct harm to be avoided by doing so.
When people behave more like horses or wolves, and act in accordance with their basic drives, moderated by the age-old social restraints that come with the approval or disapproval of their immediate family and community, they seem much less likely to cause widespread evil. It's when they become urbanized, organized, sophisticated, and indulge in ideological and philosophical passions to Set Things Right that they seem more willing to contemplate the breaking of a million or two eggs to make their ethical omelet.
Non-serious idea: monasteries and universities as a societal immune system, locking away the ethically inclined, protecting the rest of society from their predation
I wonder about Stalin, on a day-to-day basis was he consciously thinking about the greater good, or just running the routines that would keep him in power and diminish the likelihood of a coup, while also settling scores in general?
Sure, but no one will attempt to use a dead tree to rationalise their political views.
Stalin's regime placed absolute power in the hands of a group of executives for whom human life was a secondary consideration, and then isolated those executives from society.
If he was acting for the greater good, then let's be really careful about creating a supra-national executive to force change in climate policies and removing them from direct accountability for the lives of the people who will be affected.
If it was just power politics gone mad, then Stalin's regime is not necessarily an argument against a supra-national executive to fix the climate - we just need to be careful about its design.
My point is that Stalin's actual secret thoughts are somewhat immaterial, in that what he did is what essentially everybody in such a position, atop such a power structure, appears to do. I can think of very, very few men with dictatorial powers and a Sacred Mission To Improve Things who have not ended up with a horrible pile of skulls. Franco? Pinochet -- at least his pile of skulls was fairly modest, I guess. Why do we care about their inner thoughts? Even if they *are* different, it doesn't ever seem to lead to different outcomes, and outcomes are what matter.
Given Stalin offered to resign several times from General-Secretary and did promote people to be his successor (one guy was an alcoholic who died despite Stalin begging him to lay off the vodka), as well as doing things like complaining to Beria about promoting too many Georgians versus other nationalities in the USSR, and arguaably the 'doctor's purge' was to provide a place for new leadership after Stalin died theres a strong likelyood he was operating at least under the greater good sentiment.
Hitler and Mao are good examples of Good Intentions; Stalin I'm less sure about. I know you say "does it matter" to another similar reply, but I think it does here because someone who only claimed to do things for ethical reasons isn't the sort of person who'd be convinced one way or another by this essay.
The most energetic environmental activists claim the future of life on earth is at stake, and therefore insist that a new form of government is required to avoid this. Almost as a side note, we are asked to consider whether or not we should have children. To save the planet.
Carl Pham’s point is that absolute power corrupts absolutely. This is probably true, but it’s worth thinking about how these dictators came to hold that power in the first place. I maintain that the utopian mindset is a necessary precondition for the kind of governments that commit genocide.
I haven’t read much about it, but probably not. It seems like a lot of misery and death for no apparent reason or gain for Belgium. Incompetence plus ignorance plus hubris?
Absolutely. Anyone who believes perfection is readily achievable in this vale o' tears is just walking around wearing a giant "PSYCHOPATHS! EXPLOIT ME!" sandwich board that is unfortunately readily visible only to psychopaths and related scoundrels.
Well honestly I replied with more smart-assery than reason, so sorry about that. Sure, it's interesting to muse about what exactly was going on in Uncle Joe's head, in a sort of gruesome psychological post-mortem kind of way. I guess he combined phenomenal "emotional intelligence" as they call it today - since he was reportedly deeply trusted by everybody, came across very well, as a sincerely kind and thoughtful soul -- with the blackest of actual hearts. An antisocial to define the word, certainly. You wonder what kind of weird perturbation in the neural circuitry would allow that kind of brain to actually exist and function, kind of like how you wonder how idiot savants do their thing.
One nonobvious takeaway I draw from this, and related smaller scale phenomena I have observed myself, is that the most charismatic people are all too often antisocial bastards at heart. I tend to keep my distance from people who come across as *so* charming and warm, never impatient, never angry, never embarassed or mean. It's too perfect, and it brings a hint that there may be something really nasty behind an exterior *so* polished and disciplined (else why go to the work of maintaining it?) I prefer people who exhibit enough of the human failings -- pride, sloth, the usual crowd -- that I can be more certain they *are* human.
There's this cluster of theories claiming that psychopathy and "normalcy" co-evolved in humans. Psychopaths are purportedly parasites which have adapted to prey on normies, and come with an appropriate set of traits for this role, like the often noted ability to effortlessly charm people and the apparent lack of conscience or empathy. So good ol' uncle Joe wouldn't be an extreme aberration under this view, more like a perverse perfection instead.
The Soviet government, even under Stalin operated under a collective method of leadership, so while certain events will certainly be lessene or avoided altogether, there will be some things similar. Example: Trotsky won't wreck the army, and collectivization might go slower, but he might go full Eugenics on the Soviet population (he argued a socialist north america would go eugenics, but not in a racialized way like the Germans but for the benefit of all races)
I agree. And I wonder if I overlooked the word "love" in all the comments so far or if really no one uttered it. A human can love a lot without begetting kids but doing good loving and "breeding sinners" is, well, something.
The Holodomor did not starve 30 million Ukrainians. Only a few million people died in the USSR, and that was also within the RSFSR and Kazak SSR. And a significant portion of the cause was from a bad harvest, and Stalin did send aid to the Ukrainian SSR.
Speciation - going from dinosaur to bird, tree-climbing ape to tool-wielding man - takes a long time. But within-species effects - e.g., going from a bolder man to a more careful man - can happen within very short timescales, even a single generation. Especially with strong selection pressures, you'll see outsized impacts in very few generations. The classic example is the Black Death; it appeared to kill indiscriminately, but even very subtle protection from certain genes led it to cull in a way that left scars in our genomes today. I don't think that climate-inspired child-abstinence is going to have any kind of serious impact on that level. But don't underestimate how easy it would be to lose most of our fundamentalists (yes, I think that is the right word for "people who make sacrifices based on their ethics").
> Willingness to take ethical arguments seriously and make sacrifices according to their conclusions is not a trait I want purged from the gene pool.
I feel like the Catholic Church is doing a great job on this one, by making the argument that unprotected vaginal intercourse within marriage is the only ethical way to ejaculate. People who take that ethical argument seriously are likely to have a lot of children.
Depends if they use rhythm, which the church approves of. It's not reliable enough to make casual sex safe but should be sufficient to hold down the number of children to about what the couple wants.
This is as silly as the argument that says “any employer that holds X against you in the interview isn’t an employer you want to work for anyway”. It’s a nice sour grapes rationalization if not bothering to fix something that could actually be fixed.
A quick google search shows studies that attribute at most up to 50% of some ideologies to genetics, and frankly the numbers change a lot depending on the topic.
Raising children is by an overwhelming majority of opinion the most fulfilling and important thing you can do with your life. To choose to not do so on the pretext of potentially reducing the small risk of future hardship due to climate change by an immeasurably tiny amount, would be a mistake.
Besides, why save the planet if no one is around to enjoy it? If the answer is to allow other people to enjoy it, then why them and not you. The meaning of life is literally to propagate your genes. The satisfaction you might occasionally feel that hundreds of other children from poor countries who live their lives completely untroubled by any feelings of responsibility for the climate will be massively offset by your loneliness as you face solitary dotage.
Evolution selects for individual reproductive success, not species success. Helping your close kin rear children may be selected for, helping random peers isn't. The fact that some men fail to have children is no more evidence that they don't have the trait of wanting children than the fact that some people starve to death is evidence that they don't have the trait of wanting to eat.
Indeed sperm are cheap, eggs (or more precisely uteruses) are expensive, so it's good to have way more men competing for the available uteruses than can succeed -- you get the advantage of competition that enhances short-term flexibility in the species, a major concern in a species with as long a generation span as ours. We (men) are just lucky our species hasn't gone as far as honeybees, with 1000 males for every fertile female :(
Humans are not "near eusocial". Men failed to have children often because some more dominant males prevented them from doing so, not because they took on some helper role.
The effective population size is much smaller for males than females. So Y-chromosomal Adam is a much more recent common ancestor than mitochondrial Eve.
If you think about monogamy, it was a way to make sure more men had the ability to reproduce by taking men out of the market once they got married, as opposed to one man impregnating many women.
Failing to have children is a net negative for the individual, but sufficiently vigorous competition that only 50% of competitors succeed is a big positive for the tribe and the species -- and, of course, for the victorious genes. So it persists. Same reason rabbits are programmed to breed well past the carrying capacity of their ecosystem, and a good 99% or more of amphibious or aquatic small creatures born of eggs do not survive to adulthood. Mother Nature doesn't give a damn about the individual, evolution drives the survival of the *fittest* and to hell with the rest. As long as the death or failure of the rest enhances the fitness of the fittest, any behavior that results in failure or death for some or most will be preferred.
You raise an interesting point. In my experience the more educated and affluent a family the more likely the kids are to end up in different parts of the country (or world) due to educational and career opportunities. That could be part of why avoiding a solitary dotage carries less weight.
That’s the thing with regrets in old age. When you have them, it’s too late.
I read somewhere that families with real inter generational wealth are much more likely to have multiple children than the educated upper middle class. Working class people also tend to have larger families. Why is it that highly educated upper middle class couples have fewer kids?
I would say because the highly educated upper middle class think how they parent matters*. Any little slip up and the kids will fail and it will be the parents fault.
* If you fuck them or torture them or starve them that will have a catastrophic impact. But above a fairly low level of parenting competence it’s mostly genetic.
...plus the effect/influence of your friends/comrades (the similar-age group as yourself) as you grow up. (If Judith Harris is right in "The Nurture Assumption", and she is pretty convincing.)
There are ways to screw a kid up without technically doing any of those (spending years convincing a boy that men are evil and he's especially evil is probably not great for his mental health), and "torture" technically includes the mostly-fine corporal punishment (there are limits, of course, but things like a smack on the bum don't reach them), but the general "as long as you actually care about your child's wellbeing you're not going to go far wrong" is solid.
That's an excellent question. For one thing, we (upper middle class people) are taught culturally that the most important thing in life is success/achievement/"following your dreams" by clawing your way up in a world of cut-throat, zero-sum competition, and that children will necessarily get in the way of this. The "success sequence" concept seems to be an attempt to teach this mindset to working class people, who don't absorb it through their culture the way that we do through ours.
When you're in the habit of thinking of children as things that will get in the way of your life, it's easy to make the leap to thinking of them as something that gets in the way of *our* life–the life of the human race, or the life of the planet.
Then, if we want kids nevertheless, we're taught that the only way to become a worthy parent is to do so "responsibly"–once you're married, own a home, and have excellent financial prospects. That last part in particular means that the goal posts can keep moving out of reach indefinitely for any particular couple.
In PMC culture the bar for being a "good"/worthy parent is set incredibly high, and the contempt directed at "unworthy" parents is intense.
Finally and relatedly, "figuring out" childcare is especially difficult for us, because we usually don't have a lot of relatives around to help out -and- we're on a tight budget.
A wealthy family doesn't have to give as much up to have kids.
A working class family gains more by having kids because a) they can't get up a meaningful level of freedom / luxury by not having them and b) they are more likely to have them stick around and look after them in old age.
An educated upper middle class couple have to give up a lot of freedom to have kids, probably live somewhere where childcare is super expensive, and it's likely that if their kids are anything like them, they'll swan off to a different part of the world and at best feel vaguely guilty for not looking after them, at worst feel resentful and hate them, in their old age.
I think in many cases it is because they leave children until they are older–due to university, graduate school, getting started in one's career, etc–and starting later limits how many you can have. My wife & I have two kids, we wanted more, but even after spending tens of thousands of dollars on IVF two is all we got, and all we are going to have. I'm sure if we'd started younger we could have managed more – my wife had our first at 36 (natural conception), and our second at 40 (IVF; we never intended such a big gap, but she miscarried a few times, both before we started IVF, and also after it) – and then we tried more with IVF when she was 41-42, unsuccessfully, and then we decided to give up. (I'm five years younger than her, but I was also diagnosed with a moderately low sperm count, so it wouldn't be fair to put all our fertility issues on her – I'm sure my fertility would have been better 10 years earlier too.) Many poorer people still have kids in their early 20s, sometimes even their teens. For the genuinely wealthy, such as the children of the billionaire class, career and education are less pressing – they'll still pursue them, but not with the same urgency, they know they are set for life even if they fail, and their networks and access means they are likely to go places even if they don't try that hard – plus it is easy to afford nannies, etc. The upper middle class, even highly paid professionals such as doctors and lawyers and software engineers, they have to work a lot harder to make it, and that takes away a lot of time they could be focusing on reproducing instead, and while in the long-term many of them will make a lot of money, often their most fertile years are spent bootstrapping their careers with comparatively limited financial means, and by the time they get senior enough to start making real money their fertility is already fading
I think this is a big part of it. My wife and I wanted four kids. We were married at 25 so pretty young, but we waited 5 years to start trying to have kids because of getting started with careers and continuing educations. We got pregnant 4 times but lost two of the children to miscarriage (our first and fourth).
I now wish we would have started earlier (and my wife agrees).
I never understood the idea of real money as a pre-requisite for child-rearing. My eldest slept in a cardboard box next to our bed in a studio apartment for his first year. Didn't seem to do him any harm, then or now. I would say the first priority for easier child-rearing is stamina ha ha, which means younger is better. Not to mention people actually make better employees when they have family responsibilities and are a little older.
Well it kind of does. But not in such a straightforward way. We are adaptation executers, not fitness maximizers, after all.
And I agree that it's either a preposterous or a redundant claim. If someone isn't already intrinsicly motivated to have children, mentioning that Azathoth wills it, is completely ridiculous way to change their mind. If someone is already eager to have children than they do not need this justification in the first place
But in fact the genes have not managed to make us want reproductive success — few people in developed societies are producing as many children as they could successfully rear, and nobody, so far as I know, pays for the opportunity to donate to a sperm bank or to provide eggs for infertile women to incubate. Until they come up with a philoprogenitive gene, they are limited to indirect methods such as desire for sex, and humans are clever enough to find ways around those.
Of course, enough generations with contraception readily available might change that.
Well, the urges were wired up before there was such a thing as conscious thought, which has been going on for at most 50,000-100,000 years, an eyeblink in evolutionary terms. Give us a million more years, and if conscious thinking beings still exist, they will have elaborate conscious philosophical reasons to prioritize reproduction, which although they do not vary a hairsbreadth from individual to individual, they will nevertheless be fully confident each man crafts himself from pure reason.
It did not bother to favor that, because for almost all of history up until the past 50 years or so, all it had to favor was the willingness/desire to have sex, and the babies would then result, whether you wanted them or not.
Also, I have to say that I find the slavering throughout this thread to bow down and worship the unthinking imperatives of evolution and genetic imperatives, as if they are gods, somewhere between laughable and grotesque. I mean, go ahead if you want. But some of us are perfectly capable of distinguishing between our own interests and the unthinking interests of our genes, and rejecting the latter in favor of the former. I know what my genes want and I could care less. After all, they want to use me as a disposable propagating meat bag, why should I?
> all it had to favor was the willingness/desire to have sex, and the babies would then result, whether you wanted them or not.
I half agree, but the choice to *raise* those kids to adulthood at often great personal sacrifice, is hard to see in non evolutionary terms.
> After all, they want to use me as a disposable propagating meat bag, why should I?
You shouldn't.
But... I just keep thinking about how old people will so often say that the most important thing they ever did, that had the most meaning in their life was raising their children.
As a young boy I found the idea of dating girls etc silly and dumb. But then I hit puberty, and my biology made it a top priority. I think having kids is often a "second puberty" in a way. Suddenly, you now have a new primary purpose¹ in life that you gladly accept.
As a young person, I think it can be helpful to learn from to older people who have already lived life, instead of boldly assuming you know better about things you have yet done. At least personally, I wish I had done more of that.
I like the idea of a second puberty, in that clearly it re-orders peoples priorities, interests, and even their values. I mean, that has happened to me even just from having dogs, which required me to seriously modify my lifestyle and free time, and I'm happy to do it.
I am guessing you don't know too many old people who didn't have kids because they purposely CHOSE that though. I know some and they are just as content and satisfied and non-regretful. The research I've seen with respect to old people and regrets is that it is not so much about the particular choices they made but whether they did what THEY wanted to do, as opposed to what their parents/culture/spouse wanted them to do. Regrets are usually centered around giving into pressures and not doing whatever it was they really wanted to.
I don't usually +1, but in a comment thread so extensive and heated chances are someone has already expressed my position, and this is the one. The above was exactly my reaction.
It's particularly striking to see such a community ostensibly dedicated to pure reason plump so hard for simple unexamined biological imperatives.
Yup. If people said "I just want to and there's no reason for it, I cannot help myself, it's an irrepressible drive", (much like the desire for sex, food, and oxygen), that would make a LOT more sense to me than it does when they attempt to give rational explanations that are quite unconvincing. I guess the problem is they are trying to convince people who don't feel that same drive, or don't feel it enough to overcome their rational objections.
I wish we could get over the habit of pretending that the presence of consciousness liberates us from our very humanity. The very consciousness of which you are so proud is the result of gene propagation.
We only exist because our parents got together. Life without children is measurably less meaningful than life with children, and not by a small margin.
I agree that having children is good, and a society that loses interest in having children is unhealthy.
I deny that this provides *the* meaning of life or that individuals can't find equally meaningful ways of life. That's muddled thinking. You're trying to substitute a biological imperative for the necessary personal and philosophical work that is the only real way we can find meaning in life.
I would make my case for asking ‘why’ at every stage of justification, and then applying a moral lens to the answer. If the answer to the fourth off fifth ‘why’ doesn’t include children, then the answer becomes either very dark, or facile.
You seem to wrongly extrapolate you experience of value having to a general case. It's not that other value-havers are supposed to have your values, rather they will treat their values just as important as you treat yours.
It's indeed true that according to you moral lens other people "meaning of life" may look vain and not satisfying. But this can be completely irrelevant, as they can have different values, thus different things that satisfy them and a different moral lens. Imagine how weird it would be to hear that your behaviour doesn't increase the number of paperclips in the universe in the most efficient way, thus your life is meaningless.
Of course, values between humans do not differ as much as between you and a paperclips maximizer. It's not wrong to initially assume that other humans would more or less want similar things as you do. Still human values are complex and diverse enough so that even if you perceive something as the most important thing in life, for a different person it is less rewarding than the alternatives.
Imagine suggesting to the paperclip maximiser that its interest in paperclips is arbitrary, and it could be just as satisfied by collecting pebbles.
It exists to produce paperclips. It didn’t choose that purpose, but that is its purpose. Even as it collects its 75 gajillionth pebble, it’s going to feel like something's missing.
If you keep asking why, eventually you won't be able to say why we should have children either. Where will our children find meaning? Only in having more children? Does the infinite regress lead anywhere satisfying?
I think you’re right here about regression. But I never said having children is the only way for people to find meaning.
If you choose to do something about climate change, then you should know why. The more extreme the policy prescription, the better the justification needs to be. It is my my sincere hope that the first ‘why’ is to preserve human life, or better, to encourage human health. If not, then we end up in a dark place, because I have been told humans are actually the problem.
My point about meaning then becomes a comparative one; people will find more meaning in their actions if the humans they are preserving are their own progeny, compared to ‘saving humankind’.
I'm not sure what you mean here. Have you just claimed that having a consciousness is less of a part of our humanity than gene propagation? That seems bizzare.
Of course our consciousness is a result of gene propagation as well as every other our quality. Including our human values. Including a value not to do things just in order to propagate our genes.
I'm pretty sure, you share this quality as well. The idea to harm other children in order to maximize inclusive genetic fitness of your own offsprings, most likely haven't even crossed your mind. I also doubt that you would twice as much want to have a clone of yourself than a child with a person you love. I even suspect that you are not a regular genetic material donor. Correct me if I'm wrong, please.
The reasons you actually care about having children have not much directly to do with your inclusive genetic fitness. More likely it's due to the feelings of fulfilment, happiness and meaning you experience from interacting with them or even thinking about them. The knowledge, that even after your death, in a sense, you will be continued. And some people just lack these feeling towards having children. And appealing to evolution won't change that.
Our consciousness, intellect and mammalian urges coexist. If we as a species found as much meaning in industrial design as we did in raising children, there would be a lot more nice machines- a lot more, and a lot fewer humans.
Why do we have unbidden feelings of love and fulfilment despite the difficulties and frustrations of childbirth and raising children? Maybe because if it wasn’t the most meaningful thing we can do, we would avoid it entirely, and we would not be here to have this excellent discussion
Indeed, our urges and goals coexsit. They, as well as the ability to have them at all, whole our mind is a result of evolution. But it doesn't tell us how to resolve the conflicts between our values. What to find meaningful and what not - we have to use our evolved mind to do so. And claiming that some people are less human due to the way they find this meaning for themselves, is, at best, presumptious.
I appreciate the feelings of love and fulfillment. But I'm despised by the idea that I'm supposed to feel it only towards my close relatives. I'm impressed by the fact that inclusive genetic fitness optimization process managed to develop whole complexity of human values. But from the position of having these values I find this proccess and its "goals" to be meaningless and unfulfililling. I would rather do everything else.
Nowhere did I claim that people seeking alternative sources of meaning lacked humanity. Neither did I suggest you should only feel love towards your close relatives. In the context of Scott’s essay, I made the point that humans are genetically programmed to find meaning in having and raising children.
If that’s not what you want for yourself, that’s fine. I genuinely hope you find meaning in whatever you choose.
I suspect that a great many people that don't want to have children and cite climate change as a reason are people that fundamentally don't understand good relationships. If you are attachment avoidant, or you unknowingly have toxic relationship behaviors, your relationships are not rewarding. You can't imaging having children, and having relationships, is what makes life worthwhile.
Conversely, there are innumerable parents out there that don't understand good relationships because they were raised in a toxic environment themselves and then repeat the same upon their own children.
Interesting, I find this to be the exact opposite. Most of the people I know who chose not to have kid are *extremely* popular and well-loved with lots of extremely close friendships. I think they prefer freely-chosen associations with people based on mutual liking and compatible personalities, rather than the forced relationships that occur with family.
It is often the more anti-social people I've known who are NOT great with relationships who seem to think that that only way to create close relationships is by literally making new people who have no choice whatsoever but to be dependent upon you.
I mean, I can think of lots of famous people, both today and historically, that have literally hundreds of millions of people who love them and clearly have very deep friendships and often marriages, and thousands of willing romantic partners, who chose to be childless. Dolly Parton, Oprah, Betty White, Jon Hamm, George Clooney, Jennifer Aniston, etc. That's just in the realm of celebrities, but there are lots of famous artists, intellectuals, political leaders etc. that this applies to.
Me? Why are you asking me? I have a husband. We love each other a lot, have a stable, happy long-term relationship, and I'd say we have a completely average amount of friends. We do not intend to ever have children and we're in our 40s so we've probably crossed the point where it's moot and hopefully people will stop harassing us about it.
The majority of our siblings or cousins, despite them all being married, stable, and in high-earning professions, have made the same decision. Which makes me think that it's a hard-wired preference. Everyone is perfectly stable and normal and there aren't any abusive or crappy relationships there. I just think it isn't appealing to any of us.
Also, I completely disagree with popular people being terrible people. I think that's a complete myth based on envy and a bunch of dumb 80s movies written by angry guys who were still pissed they didn't get the prom queen in high school or whatever. Most popular people are actually extremely likeable and that's why they're popular.
Yes, they've all talked about it and purposely chose not to have kids. These people are millionaires/billionaires and most are married and have their choice of mates, they can do whatever they want. Of course if they had wanted kids they could've had them.
Parenting very much is a form of Stockholm syndrome but one you entered into by choice. Sure you kind of understand that the next 18yrs (ideally) you're subject to the desires and demands of this person you brought into the world. And all of the parents I know, all spin the day-to-day drudgery in some positive way. My wife and I find joy in raising our 2 kids but we also recognize that it's also very stressful, exhausting and a myriad of other emotions and colorful language.
Am I happier w/ kids? That answer depends on the day I'm having. I will say that scheduled time away from the kids is very therapeutic for both of us.
Quoting from memory, women polled about life satisfaction show a dip in life satisfaction in the years immediately after their children have left home. Men polled about life satisfaction show an increase in life satisfaction in the years immediately after their children have left home.
Old data from Scandinavia, I do not remember if it was cross-section studies or a panel, it is only an average tendency and in any case my hunch is that in the longer run, life satisfaction reverts back to people's expressed "standard". Still, it is a fun (average) gender difference, worth pursuing in future research.
I am just guessing here, but I assume that when kids leave home, it changes the dynamic of a potential divorce in man's favor. Even if most couples don't divorce at that moment, they still perceive the counterfactual and it influences their power balance.
Before: The typical outcome of a divorce is that the kids stay with their mother, the father must pay, and if the mother decides she hates him, he might never see his kids again.
After: Kids can no longer be used as hostages. The man has an opportunity to find a younger woman, and optionally start a new family. The chances for the woman to do the same are much worse.
Note that there are potential confounders there, since I'm fairly sure the study didn't involve randomly assigning people to have kids or not have kids.
Sure, it's entirely possible that unhappy people try to have kids more often, perhaps as an attempt to find meaning or purpose. The lesson seems basically the same though: think twice before having kids and question whether being a parent is what you really want.
Is that 51% of people were happier without children or 99%? Also you shouldn't make life choices as significant as having children based on a study someone did by surveying people.
"Overwhelming" is a stretch. There is actual research on this question; in the US, parents are repeatedly found to be less happy than non-parents, though this effect is strongest in the US and weakest in non-industrialized countries:
There's a lot more evidence out there (eg, men seem to get a lot more happiness from children than women, etc) that I'm not going to track down, but I think we're a long way from "overwhelming majority of opinion".
I have run across this before, but I think the proper question to have asked is not about happiness level but something more along the lines of, "If you could do it again without having one or more of the children you had, would you choose that?" It is pretty easy to toss off an abstract number for ill-defined "happiness," but the root question is whether the journey was worth the price.
But you can't ask this question (or anything similar) to those without children, so there's no proper comparison group. Even if all parents answer your question in the affirmative (100% regret), it doesn't tell us anything about how their current state compares with those who are not parents (do they 100% regret not having children?).
While not perfect, there is a bit of research behind the measures of 'happiness' that are commonly used, suggesting they capture something meaningful.
"The five countries displaying the largest life-satisfaction premia to
parenthood are Montenegro (5.12), China (4.85), Kyrgyzstan (4.64), Taiwan (3.70), and Vietnam (3.13). At the other extreme, the five countries displaying the largest negative parenthood premia are Macedonia (-6.82), Tunisia (-4.71), Libya (-3.87), Jordan (-3.71), and Zimbabwe (-3.51)."
So there are countries where parenthood=happinesss, but apparently having a child in Macedonia is the worst.
I recognize that all of these studies are limited by being observational studies based on self-report. Maybe unhappy people are more likely to have children? In the hopes of being happier, or because they've given up on their own dreams and would like to foist them on some unwitting infant.
Ideally someone would run a randomized trial, but I doubt that would pass the ethics committee.
Macedonia is disputed with Greece, and when Yugoslavia collapsed, there was ethnic fighting between Macedonians and Albanians. Secondarily, Macedonia was (is in the ase of Greece now) disputed between Serbia, Greece, and Bulgaria so that might be part of it
You can argue that level of sacrifice might be one of the strongest ways of "dying" in that you arent leaving genetic descendants around. It is also a nice counterargument to a common conservative argument that those not planning on reproducing have no right to make poicies about the future, beause their offspring wont deal with the effect. It seems to be those focused on amoral familialism or just on their breeding would care less about a macro-sacle future for the human species instead.
Your logic is faulty in part 2. Yes, theoretically, if it was a binary decision between kid/no kid with no other changes in your life whatsoever, then it would hold. But this is never the case. Kid sucks out, optimistically, 2-3 years of productive life outside of work, either from you or your partners or some split in between. Pessimistically, much more than that. That's a massive investment that you make in order to bring ONE voter into the world. Compare that to, for example, trying to convince your friends - who are intending to have kids regardless - to show up to votes and to vote appropriately. If you have spent several whole years doing that, as a dedicated second-job more or less, I would wager you would get more than one new voter convinced (with stacking effects on their kids, naturally). And these are, most likely, your most productive years - while you are young and full of energy and enthusiasm.
On top of that, they suck out absolutely enormous amounts of money - money you could spend much more efficiently. Sure you could spend something like 400k dollars raising a kid, OR you can donate those 400k dollars. Return on investment doing basically anything at all with that money is going to be ridiculously better than childrearing.
Have kids if that's what you are into, but from a pure cold cost/benefit standpoint, it's a terrible idea.
Kids = commitment. Why would I trust a person who has no skin in the game to act in the best interests of society? Donate money all you like, but if the only thing restraining you from nihilism is a commitment to EA, then good luck.
I bloody well live in this world. How am I supposed to have more skin in the game than the literal 100% of skin I have.
Next you will say that kids make me have skin in the game after my death, but that is totally false, they just make me make sure my kids will have a good life. Somehow dictators in various places don't try to fix their own governments because they have kids, they just make sure their kid will inherit their stuff and call it a day.
Having kids will change your sense of what “you” are, what matters in life, and what you are willing to endure.
Having kids changed me in such a way that I now make much more money than I did previously. Before having kids, i was always focused on my own dead trying to save the world. I was blind to how ineffective I was at taking good care of myself. The end result here is that even though I was very motivated before, it was all external, shooting way above my pay grade, and thus wasted effort. Having kids made me work on my self to the point that I now give way more to EA than I was capable of earlier.
If I had to summarize this concretely: I have much better discipline and much better habits. I prioritize my time much more effectively.
So, I used to spend a ton of time on facebook, twitter, and the news. Now i've deleted social media accounts and only read printed news.
I used to spent a lot of time bouncing between various projects i was somewhat enthusiastic about. Now, i've accepted that i have _so little time_ that I really need to pick one project and stick with it. As a result, i managed to build a cryptocurrency that had a few thousand dollars flowing through it, at any one time. All my previous 'side projects' went nowhere.
I used to go to parties with friends, travel more, and watch more tv. Those are all enjoyable things to do! But they don't build exponentially on top of each other over time. Having kids constrianed my free time _so severely_ that i needed to aggressively prioritize, which spilled over into benefits at work. Dealing with unreasonable kids made it easier to accept the more reasonable behavior from adults at work.
I could go on - parenting, to me, has felt like this contuous marathon class in spiritual growth, with practical exercises every single day.
This is a typical pattern, by the way—men make more money after birth of a child because they invest more in their careers. Women typically go in the opposite direction.
If you think of the majority of households as one man and one woman with children, this would really just be a shift in who is working on what. If a woman works less at a job and more with raising children, and the man works more in his job to offset the income loss from his wife, than this would make sense. It's still going to the same pool, and it only seems like the woman in the scenario has "lost" something if you don't value the work she is putting into raising a child.
There are a lot of parents out there who had kids and weren't acting in the best interests of society because it never entered their minds to consider society.
Actually also faulty in part 1, unless you show that costs from temperature rise are linear. I am pretty sure they aren't, so talking about "30% of the heating" is highly misleading. Things like larger floods and longer drought seasons and such are very much not linear in their impact versus size, and can very easily just get to the point where mitigation strategies we have right now just straight up don't work. IIRC Australia already has an issue where they can't do controlled forest burns because weather conditions never allow for one to happen.
Claiming that first world people will be separated from these changes is also highly misleading. You aren't an island. If "subsistence farmers" in Congo aren't having a great time, they aren't going to be making a lot of food for the locals. If there is no food for the locals, locals will go into farming as opposed to e.g. mining cobalt (half of worldwide supply btw), and if there is no cobalt, there won't be any microchips being made in China, and no computers on the shelves in the US. Crises in poor non-western countries totally can royally fuck you, in ways that you (and your children) will feel very strongly.
It's also not correct to claim that there will always be slack that could be redirected to solve climate problems if political pressure gets too severe. Yes, this is a large effect, and it will take place. But even relatively large effects can be overwhelmed. E.g. the world is having a bit of an energy crisis recently due to several crises compounding on one another. An easy solution to it would have been having more nuclear plants. But you can't build those overnight, you need several years. So even if political pressure suddenly turns in that direction, you can be stuck not having any solution for years.
I agree, many problems caused by global warming are not linear
My favorite metaphor about this is from Jean-Marc Jancovici:
"If your internal temperature is 3°C above normal you'll have to spend, say, a week in bed. If it's 6 °C above normal, two weeks in bed aren't going to save you"
Claiming that you could spend money more efficiently in other places than on raising a child represents a common misapplication of utilitarianism(s).
Utilitarianism(s) that involve spending your money to buy *other people's* utility have a lot of well-understood problems. You could notice these problems just cogitating in your armchair for five minutes.
A more stable and less exploitable utilitarianism is the kind where you use utility to measure your own preferences over possible outcomes. If you are a compassionate person who cares a lot about the world in the abstract, then you will have high utility valuations of outcomes that are good for large numbers of strangers.
But your utility valuation of your own child's well-being will definitely exceed your valuation of the well-being of strangers. There will be common-sense marginal tradeoffs to be found here, of course. You might still prefer to give $20k to an effective charity rather than buy your kid a brand new car when they turn 16. But up to that marginal threshold, you will be much more effective at buying yourself utility buy spending money on your kid.
To put it very straightforwardly: spending $400k on your child is definitely a higher return than any other place you could spend that money, if you're measuring return in subjective utility. This is the pure, cold cost/benefit calculation, and it favors having kids, because what you are after is utility, not having a fat bank account. And there is no substantial (non-circular) justification for having a different justification than subjective utility.
You can see that this is correct by understanding that human beings are actually much more rational in the local, first-order sense than they often get credit for, and then observing what people actually tend to do. What they tend to do is have kids and spend a lot of money on them, but not 100% of their money, while also having a variety of other interests, both pro-social and otherwise.
This touches on the dark side of the EA mentality, where "utility" is allowed to be stripped entirely from your first-person reference frame. The result is smart people who feel awful all the time because they have subjugated their own preferences to what they imagine the needs of distant strangers to be. This is not healthy and doesn't even really work, because (in my experience) these people often burn out and give up eventually.
I never mentioned anything about utility. In fact I explicitly said that if you feel like it, you can have kids.
I am arguing against the premises of the actual article: someone who, for whatever reason, is on the edge of deciding not to have kids. It's clear that for them having kids does not provide all that much utility, compared to concerns related to the rest of humanity. Scott is arguing that they should consider voting effects: I argue that if they are to consider that, there are much more effective strategies to achieve that result that don't involve kids, and arguing from the implicit position that those don't exist is fallacious.
I really dislike this sort of thinking because you're taking a concept like utility and stripping it of most of the things that make it useful or interesting. If you aren't trying to compare utility intersubjectively, then there's no reason to have the concept at all! You end up with this circular argument where utility is defined just by what you already want to do so thus everyone is an efficient utility maximizer or near to, and any further thinking on the topic just makes people unhappy.
The martian perspective on morality is what makes EA stuff compelling. Our bias towards people in our vicinity and in our ingroup is something we often recognize as bad, especially when we see it in others, so why not in our own morality? If it is morally good to alleviate the suffering of others, why not spend strategically to maximize the amount of suffering that you can alleviate?
As a Christian, I think a lot about how Jesus said a) that divine grace rather than meritorious deeds were the only way that anyone could enter the kingdom of heaven, b) that you still had to follow the law and to humble yourself before God in order to get grace, and c) after all that the next best thing to do to ensure your place in Heaven would be to give all your money to the poor. Self-sacrifice to make others better off is a core part of western morality, and we shouldn't give that up just because it's a demanding standard to meet.
Basic decision theory as practiced by economists, industrial engineers and planners, etc. uses subjective first-person utility. It's actually very useful for formalizing and measuring preferences in ambiguous domains. It's also a way of understanding and subsequently breaking preference cycles, and a tool for more explicit self-knowledge. It doesn't make people unhappy. What it does is clarify difficult choices and assist people in seeing their way through to a choice, and understanding which choice is the one that will probably end up making them happy, in domains when the answer is unclear.
The basic concept of intersubjective utility is well-understood to be fraught with problems. You can, and probably should, view all of the "utilitarian paradoxes" such as the Repugnant Conclusion as successful reductio ad absurdum arguments against the whole idea.
Scott himself implicitly (or maybe explicitly) acknowledges that the Martian perspective on morality is not really psychologically healthy to take seriously, and instead advocates that people just make a habit of donating 10%. There is no principled backstop for this 10% number, it is simply an admission that "utilitarianism" doesn't really work.
I want to emphasize this. "Utilitarianism" isn't required to consider that maybe we should consciously try to understand the value of distant unfortunate people. This is not "utilitarianism." This is just a more mature, circumspect, reflective, cosmopolitan form of humanism. And further, once you decide to be more thoughtful in your humanism, it's worth thinking further about how exactly to allocate your resources to do more good. Again: not "utilitarianism."
Maybe you decide upon reflection that you will only feel that you have met your own exacting moral needs if you give away 95% of your money. If you do decide that, then that is still not "utilitarianism." Your own moral sense is fundamental, and prior to, your theory of moral valuation.
The best you can say for utilitarianism is that it should be taken seriously but not literally. The serious-but-not-literal version of utilitarianism is just consequentialism, the basic notion that the moral measure of an action depends on its consequences, with all the details of how that measurement should be operationalized left as an exercise to the individual. This is, frankly, not a morality. It's a gesture in the direction of how you might want to think about morality.
I was an econ undergrad and I don't think subjective first-person utility was ever very useful as a concept. The only time I think it would even come up is in micro modeling (otherwise we would usually just aggregate the utility of tons of people at once) and in cases like that we used utility to express revealed preferences. In other words, we built backwards from what people chose to construct their decisionmaking process as if it were rational, but this is the opposite of what you would want to do if you were providing guidance on a difficult decision. I'm not sure that counting utils would ever be more useful than making a pros and cons list given that we usually face tradeoffs between incommensurable goods.
I've always seen the "repugnant conclusion" as pretty obvious, and I don't really see what's so bad about it. I'm not very committed to whether utilitarianism stands or falls but I think you're still giving it short shrift. It's easier for me to stomach the framework of utility on a mass scale where we're mostly considering rather large swings in welfare for people, and I don't know that any other moral philosophy really copes with the numerical scale attached to many moral problems. I don't think I consider myself a utilitarian, but I do see the framework of trying to relieve suffering en masse as a good one-- getting you to similar EA conclusions without committing to an idea as problem-wrought as utility.
The 10% rule is exactly the same sort of thing, trying to tame the philosophy by flinching away from its natural moral conclusions. What great moral teachers in history have ended their sermons by caveating, "oh, if you're starting to feel burnt out, then all of your moral obligations cease"?
I see that you learned about subjective utility and decision theory the "bad" way, and I'm sorry to hear that. It is indeed almost completely useless and probably even counterproductive to use the way you described.
I guess I think that a moral theory is pretty useless if it isn't successful descriptively (nobody really behaves that way) nor proscriptively (nobody can actually sustainable behave that way). Lots of ideas sound good in theory.
This is getting increasingly condescending. I'd rather you actually present how you think that subjective utility can be useful, because I don't see any use case for it right now.
I'm not sure why the descriptive point matters, given that we aren't living surrounded by moral paragons. I still take the basic point of Singerism fairly seriously-- most of us would want to step in to save a drowning child in an emergency but we avoid morally equivalent actions we could accomplish by donating money. I think moral philosophy writ large follows the format of taking an everyday moral intuition and trying to think what would happen if we applied that instinct in a coherent way.
The prescriptive point is stronger, but it seems underthought. For one, just like how it might be good for society to strive for utopia, it might be good for people to strive to imitate a moral paragon whom they cannot actually copy. For another, just because there are few people taking up a certain pattern of living and acting doesn't mean that its an impossible way to live and act. Everyone rationalizes their misdeeds after the fact, and we rarely take excuses involving discomfort or lack of enjoyment seriously-- you aren't allowed to walk away from the drowning child because you're afraid that your clothes will get wet, and if others walk away while the child drowns that doesn't give you any excuse.
How much positive utility (or just straight dollars) do you think a child would eventually add to society? A quick search shows about $36,000 median personal income. Multiple that by 65-18 = 47 productive years, and that comes to a little under $1.7 million. For most people who are reading this website and considering climate when deciding to have a child, I am confident to say that the number is multiples higher than that.
Sure, not all of that money is well spent, but neither would the $400,000 that would otherwise be budgeted for a child. For those seeking pure EA considerations, it may be rational to look at how much of the money would be spent on charity verses kids, but the numbers are definitely in favor of having the kid in terms of overall productivity. If you raise them well, you can have a much higher likelihood of them being more productive and more willing to donate to charity. Surely more than enough to offset a few years of productivity invested in them.
If you follow the logic that says each new child represents 60 tons of carbon a year, as Scott addresses, then each child would be worth the equivalent of $2.1 million a year. I will obviously add the caveat that the 60 ton number is non-intuitive and probably bunk, so that number is too, but it would be apples to apples at least.
Ahhhh, but you don't sound like you're old yet. Once you're elderly, kids can turn out to be a fantastic investment! Believe me, you don't want to face the social services and medical nightmares that await you without a younger person to assist you and represent you as your strength, health, and cognitive skills wane.
In this community, I bet I am something of an outlier, as a parent to four children. Actually, I'd be curious what the demographics look like (a suggestion for a future survey). Being a parent is not easy - it affects the time you have to devote to your career; you will most likely travel a lot less; you most definitely sleep a lot less; you will have a lot of anxiety and stress and other mental health concerns. And yet, parenthood is also capable of creating some of the most unique and supernal joys. Interacting with and teaching your children provides a sense of fulfillment that is hard to match through any other endeavor.
More to the point, I have always made climate-friendly lifestyle and reasoning an integral part of our family life. Unlike virtually all of their suburban friends who get shuttled to school, my kids walk. They see me take the bike and trailer to get groceries (for 6 people, it's quite a load). While we eat some meat, we eat it pretty sparingly. We spend a lot of time cultivating our own little vegetable garden. We avoid buying new things whenever possible and basically always have the motto of seeing if we can use anything for something useful before it joins the landfill. We limit our travel, and when we do recreate, we often opt for simple outings in the nearby natural world, rather than engaging in some resource-heavy travel and recreation.
My hope (my plan, even) is that my children will each have a negative carbon net-influence (direct use + effective change) in the world through their lives. And it is about more than carbon. Access to clean water, clean air, and other important environmental resources are limited as well. Obviously they will consume some amount of resources themselves. But if they can become part of a force that helps convince society to carefully care for this absolutely miraculous planet that we live on, then I trust that they will, in all of its cliché-ness glory, make the world a better place.
Thank you for sharing this, and for doing what you do. I have two kids and fully admit that I don't have anywhere near the level of energy or dedication that you have to teaching them about climate change. But I still focus on taking about it, demonstrating how our actions care for the planet, and also other topics I find important such as equality /equity and understanding that others are less fortunate than us (donations). I'm likewise hopeful that your kids, my kids, or other similarly raised kids, will lead to a better world and even help solve this crisis.
This would be relevant to cross check with age - I expect a lot of readers are under 25 and will have kids in the future, but I don’t know if that is 1% or 50% of responders.
I had forgotten that the basic data existed in the survey, so thank you for the reminder. I also agree with Kenny's comment - that it is probably age dependent. To add some context, I had my 4 kids by the age of 30.
Earlier in my life, during my ph.d program, I was absolutely the only one out of dozens of students that was both under the age of 25 and also had a kid. Two by the time I finished, actually. It was not easy - but it actually gave some meta-benefits - like keeping me motivated and focused more than I think I would have been otherwise. And my life choices are obviously not what most people do. But I am convinced that education/careers and parenthood do not have to be mutually exclusive, even at a given point in time - whether for fathers or mothers. Sometimes it is only possible, though, with sacrifice and great effort by all involved. And even then it may be judged to be not feasible. I guess we were lucky enough with our life circumstances to have it work for us.
Thank you Scott. Someone needed to write this post, and I'm glad it's you.
I've always though all of this is blindingly obvious and I'm a bit shocked every time when I hear similar arguments in "polite company". Even if even 5% of people are subconsciously convinced by this, it's a demographic tragedy of planetary proportions, the impact of which will be felt throughout the future.
I always feel like if I say "hold on, that makes no sense", I might be branded a climate denying crackpot since "everyone knows" "Mother Earth" is "suffering" from "overpopulation" etc etc
At some point you have to help these people, though. There's nowhere near enough skepticism about climatology in the world. We need at least 1000x more given the many reliability problems within it. Post-COVID you may find moderates are more willing to consider the possibility that scientists aren't 100% trustworthy all the time.
Skepticism about climatology isn’t what’s needed - a better understanding of what climatology *actually* says is. It doesn’t say the world is doomed, and people need to understand what it *actually* says, not some vulgar exaggeration of it.
I'm curious what makes you so sure that climatology rigorously follows the scientific method, as a field. My (relatively new, for me) belief that there should be more skepticism about it is based on the view that the culture within the field seems to have lost touch with the basic rules of science and that therefore, the claims - even those made by the IPCC directly - shouldn't be taken too seriously. Certainly not seriously enough to avoid having children about it. I mean, that's a serious step. If a woman decides not to have kids because she is convinced climatology is a rigorous field, and then discovers too late that there's some error in the science that was being covered up to save face, she could spend decades regretting it.
I am not "so sure" that climatology "rigorously" follow "the scientific method". But I am fairly confident that it's no worse than your average field, whether that be epidemiology, or macroeconomics, or transportation engineering. All of these fields are fairly mediocre at making predictions. But in the case of climate science, you could fix most of the problems of people thinking doom and gloom thoughts by just getting people to pay attention to the actual scientists, and not the media and political caricatures of them. Getting them to question these forecasts in the opposite direction of their own biases is not going to be a helpful project.
Could you provide an example of a scientist or group that can be paid attention to in a way that does not require a large investiture to get familiar with the field?
We generally rely on media to filter the information down to us, but they do such a poor job of it there generally is someone in the "really smart but not media" world that can boil it down for smart people, and sometimes that person is one of the scientists who just happens to have the ability and time to talk to non-scientists, but it can be hard to find and hard to know who to trust.
For what it's worth... I think it's very wasteful for society to require the average person to trawl through thousand-page reports to get the basic facts to form their worldview. This is where having better-funded, high quality media outlets would be very beneficial. We need to filter the complexity of the world. Even for a pretty smart person this approach of becoming a domain expert to have an opinion can only really work for one or two domains.
I was hopeful about Vox on this, but unfortunately they ended up more focusing on filling the media niche that Huffington Post used to occupy. They still do a lot more engaging with academic research in a meaningful way than most of the rest of the media, and some of their writers (notably Kelsey Piper, but also everyone affiliated with "Future Perfect") are really good, but some just know how to get clicks by slotting something into the standard left/liberal clickbait model.
Whether or not it rigorously follows the scientific method, it remains true that climatology doesn't say the world will end in 2100, or even that we'll be eating rats.
For what it is worth, my reading of the situation is that both the IPCC and Nordhaus are trying to make things look as alarming as possible, subject to the constraint of not telling lies. That makes them much better than the popular catastrophist talk, but probably an upper bound on how bad things can reasonably be expected to be. Most of the exaggeration isn't in the bare facts of projected change, temperature and sea level and such, but in the consequences.
Part of it is ignoring the positive effects. I note, for instance, that Scott talks about climate change hitting subsistence farmers very hard, ignoring the fact that doubling CO2 concentration increases the yield of most crops by about 30% while reducing their need for water. He talks of people dying from climate change, ignores the fact that many more people die from cold than from heat, and the same climate change that increases deaths from heat decreases them from cold.
Actually, one of the effects of climate change could be more cold snaps. Perhaps a better phrasing would be "climate wierding". And we don't exactly know if the water decrease would be less than the benefit from extra CO2
Start by reading chapters 3 and 11 in the latest IPCC report, they are both level-headed and informative on what we know about climate change so far, with most of the caveats (related to data problems) that you would expect. Skip the first "summary" chapter, which is far less informative. The report is downloadable for free as pdf files.
>There's nowhere near enough skepticism about climatology in the world. We need at least 1000x more given the many reliability problems within it.
Do you think this is a reasonable standard? As a thought experiment, imagine that climate change is exactly as bad as the medium case IPCC prediction. If it WERE actually happening, how might the scientific establishment or policymakers ascertain a reasonable approximation of the truth of the matter? Do you think they could do that with 1000x the current level of skepticism over climatology?
Hm, I find this type of doom scenario completely out of place, just like the usual doom scenarios that are put on top of climate change (which is a very severe problem even without doom scenarios, not to be be mistaken).
Why is it a "demographic tragedy" if fewer children are born? I am totally not into stupid talk about "Mother Earth" "suffering" from "overpopulation". But the other extreme, "more people = good" is also absolutely not obvious to me. If I could choose between the scenarios where the global number of people in the next generation is larger by 10%, or stays the same, or is smaller by 10%, then I would find it really hard to decide. I am just not sure which one would give the best quality of life. But I don't think that "demographic catastrophy" is the right branding for the shrinking scenario.
I wouldn’t use the word “tragedy” but broadly speaking a shrinking population leads to shrinking real GDP growth which in turn leads to political unrest. Japan seems to have avoided this for now, however, so maybe it’s not an iron law.
Perhaps. How established is that? It seems to me that we didn't have many countries with shrinking population so far.
On the other hand, there are plenty of examples of countries who had a strong population growth, ended up having a large number of young people who couldn't find jobs, and got political unrest or even revolution. For example, the Arab spring seems to fit this picture. But perhaps this just happens if the population grows *too* quickly?
(I assume that we are both talking about GDP per capita.)
I think Egypt is an example of how dictatorships and crony capitalism retard growth and dynamism, leading to a lot of unemployed and angry youth. The jury is still out on how liberal, developed economies can thrive long term without population growth.
The margins are too narrow here, metaphorically speaking, to contain a full answer, but I'll just leave a couple of videos where Elon Musk talks about this (people kind of lost track of this now that he's mostly known for being a billionaire, but all of this ventures were originally envisioned to mitigate significant risks to humanity - climate change via Tesla, planetary-scale risks via SpaceX, AI risk via OpenAI and Neurolink): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUXmDiaD_04https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovAtU4i5mDM
The only argument I found in this video was that the social systems (especially retirement systems) are not designed for declining populations. But this is a problem to be solved, not a tragedy.
I do acknowledge that it's really hard to redesign an established social system. And there are other challenges, for example developing infrastructure strategies for shrinking cities or regions. But I find it strange to consider climate change challenges to be manageable, but population decline as doom.
Besides, the US population is not expected to shrink in the next 50(?) years or so, and also the world fertility rate has not (yet?) sunk below replacement level. Though I agree that there will be hard demographic challenges to countries like China, Brazil, or much of Europe.
I don't think it would be a demographic tragedy if fewer children are born. But I do think it's an ongoing demographic tragedy that fewer and fewer children are being born into historically-successful groups, while more and more children are being born into historically-unsuccessful groups -- e.g. Somalia has a fertility rate of 6.0 children per woman, while Switzerland has 1.48.
The question would be survivalship into adulthood. I bet nearly 99% of children born in Switzerland live to be adults, but fewer do in Somalia. Although, I'm sure with 6 kids per woman, they would still have more kids surviving into adulthood than Switzerland.
Well, one reason would be that population grows *and shrinks* exponentially, like pandemics, so it tends to wildly overshoot human expectations, in both directions. Like the world looked like it was going to be incredibly overpopulated very quickly, too fast for humans to do something sensible about, in the 1960s, so you had things like China's One Child Policy, with quite draconian and sometimes inhuman enforcement. Fast forward 50 years, and population in Russia and Japan is now crashing, and once again running ahead of human psycho-social expectations and causing people to flop around and squawk.
Human reason is just not good at coping with exponential growth and decay, so our ability to *manage* either population growth or decline is poor. We are very capable of overshooting badly in either direction.
Having more population means having more human resources, with everything that that entails-- more works of art, more scientific papers, more people in loving relationships. The value that each person produces economically is now almost always much larger than their subsistence needs, which results in a per person excess of wealth that can be directed in many productive ways. All of this is agnostic of socio-political system.
But to be specific to our socio-political system, society runs more smoothly when the economy/level of wealth is growing. People see a brighter future for themselves and their children and want to work cooperatively in a positive sum game. In a zero or negative sum situation people are much more likely to seek conflict across sectors of society as politics becomes about deciding who holds on to their wealth when the overall pool shrinks. If this all sounds too abstract, think about how much harder it would be to pay for social security/medicare with a shrinking economy and population or how hard it would be to keep the debt-to-GDP ratio under control with a falling GDP.
I wonder how much of this "I am not having kids because of climate change" is going on because it is not very socially acceptable to just declare "I am not having kids because I just don´t want to".
Given the broader trends in developed nation natality rates, it does kinda feel like people are just looking for an excuse that makes them look good and happen to land on this one.
I agree. This is the anti-natalist version of “The vaccine isn’t FDA approved” or “I won’t get married until it’s legal for everyone” with the benefit of a low likelihood of your excuse becoming moot by government action.
Besides having your own children, you can also adopt. This has a much lower incremental carbon cost, and whether or not you adopt these children will still exist so the question of "bringing a child into a horrible future" doesn't need to influence your thinking. Also, if you can provide a loving and stable household, you can increase their chances of becoming a happy and functional adult who contributes a lot to society. That could be an ideal compromise.
Or would it? It's hard to say without looking at a lot of numbers.
Maybe. Adopting is prohibitively expensive and difficult for many people, including middle class families. Many people with a history of any kind of illness may not be allowed to adopt.
We have a severe shortage of babies. Demand outstrips supply.
If someone wants their genes to propagate but doesn't want the work of raising kids, make a baby and give it up for adoption. The demand is so high that the baby will likely end up in an upper-middle-class household.
Why do you want people to have kids so badly? Is it because you've been reading too many things about how ageing demographics hurt economies? I'm not interested in having kids for you; the economy is already screwed, climate change is already bad, and I'm not part of this demographic that will bear kids into a comfortable united states lifestyle. What do you want from me?
> Aside from that, the only thing that will solve global warming is application of human intellect. Where are we going to get that from?
Human intellect is one input. In a finite system, there are diminishing returns on *every* input. If there are only a certain number of gains to be had, then that's all you will get, no matter how much intellect you dump in.
There is in fact more than enough human intellect available to explore all the likely fruitful approaches. There would be more than enough at one tenth the current population.
... but a larger population makes the problem harder for intellect to solve.
> life doesn’t have meaning, it just is. Tell that to the therapists. Nihilism is not likely to save the world, neither will passionate empathy. But the intersection between cold, hyper rational intelligence and compassion is a narrow shelf on which to place all our bets.
Are you the type of person, then, to say that the lives of homosexuals prior to IVF completely lacked meaning? Or for that matter, are the lives of the parents of people who end up as antinatalists without meaning, since they failed to propagate their genes beyond one generation? These groups, by no fault of their own, cause a state where someone who is physically capable of having children does not. Is that an immoral action on their part, since they led to that result? Do people who die in childhood, or prior to having children, lack any meaning to their lives? I feel that this argument, besides being maximally uncharitable to anyone without plans to have children, is not coherent.
No. I shudder to think what ‘type of person’ would assume someone else’s life ‘completely lacked meaning’. There is no lack of charity in my statement either.
People find meaning in all sorts of things: fellowship, education, art, exercise, their profession, charity. My statement is simply to say that these things can never be as meaningful as raising your own children.
It is, as you are clearly aware, very sad for people who cannot conceive. They, and people who choose not to have children will find other forms of fulfilment in their lives, but these things will almost certainly not be as meaningful as raising children.
> My statement is simply to say that these things can never be as meaningful as raising your own children.
THAT is a horribly arrogant, presumptious, offensive, socially dangerous statement. That sort of talk is exactly what leads people down the very path you're disclaiming. It has no place in any conversation, ever. It is a WORSE thing to say than a simple string of slurs and invective. Saying it was bad and you should feel bad.
You are NOT allowed to pass judgement on other people's goals or values or on the worth of their lives. You can negotiate on what actually gets DONE, but you are not even allowed an opinion about what anybody else should WANT.
That is a basic part of the modern social contract, and one of the major things that makes the modern social contract superior to previous arrangements.
As for "meaning", I claim that you are afraid of taking responsibility for your own values, so you pretend that something external to you could somehow favor one set over another. You use the word "meaning" as a tag for that thing.
But since it is impossible for there even to BE any such external source of value, and since you can't describe what such a thing would be like if it DID exist, the word is in effect all connotation and no denotation. It's a sound you utter to make yourself feel better about a problem you've imagined for yourself. You ascribe "meaning" to things that make you, personally, feel comfortable. It is, in effect, all connotation and no denotation.
Your kink is OK as long as you just use it as a personal security blanket, but it doesn't mean you get to use it as public justification for destructive and dehumanizing arguments or actions.
The title is not "You should have kids"; it is not "You shouldn't give up on having kids". It's "You shouldn't give up on having kids specifically for this following reason."
Well, aging demographics will hurt *you* as well, as you get older and become part of that pool of retired people who want their pensions (wherever they invested them) to live on, and younger workers to be there as doctors, nurses, care home assistants, and other necessary aides.
There's a huge range of responses in the first world to aging demographics, but the obvious solution is to bring in immigrants to keep the population stable or growing. Japan won't touch this with a barge pole; Canada more-or-less-happily brings in lots of immigrants, selecting primarily for economic usefulness.
From an ethical point of view, this means that if you are Canadian, some not-entirely random person from the third-world will get the chances your non-existent child does not consume.
The US isn't as anti-immigration as Japan, but also isn't as pro-immigration as Canada, so the calculus is less obvious for people living there, such as Scott and quite likely the majority of his readers.
A lot more of the immigrants to Canada are admitted legally, while a greater proportion in the US come in 'illegally' or stay 'illegally', and may or may not end up legalized. So I think that impacts of the 'more-or-less-happily' comparison.
There's a limited pool of immigrants. Certainly a lot of people want to come to the US, but we will lose a lot of population over time and birthrates will meanwhile decline in other countries too. Plus if we really care about using immigration to boost the economy we should just open the borders now and take in all the immigrants we can even if it drains the pool faster.
Likewise, boosting the number of people born (including by stuff like decreasing infant mortality, which is still sort of high in the US) will boost the economy so we ought to do that as much as possible as quickly as possible. It's also a more sustainable long term solution since immigration might not keep working outside another 100 or so years. We ought to do both at once to make the world and the country better off.
The US would become significantly more pro-immigration if we selected immigrants the way Canada does, where it's managed to benefit the host nation instead of a charity project to the immigrant.
My suspicion is that those Americans who are virulently anti-immigrant would tell the same stories about useless immigrants coming here to live on welfare, etc. etc. regardless of whether any such people had existed for the past century, and those who were virulently pro-immigration would have stories of individual immigrants who were massively successful and/or did immense amounts of good.
I say this as an immigrant to the US, that went through many many hoops intended to guarantee I was good for the US economy, including being stuck working in an unpleasant job for years because I couldn't move until the paperwork was complete, or even immediately afterwards, and political football was happening with the H1 quotas.
OTOH, I did "take the job" of some American who doubtless would otherwise have stepped directly from his lost factory job to a role as a senior software engineer, if only my employer had been forced by lack of potential employees to give up on requiring training and experience. (More likely the position would have gone unfilled forever, just as we were required to "prove" to the INS. But that's not what the average political anti-immigrant appeared to believe.)
This is the same "assume my enemies are all lying about their true motives" that Scott mentions in the highlights to this post, when its about having kids or abortion or, yes, immigration.
And, yes, on each of those issues, there are surely *some* people lying about their true motives.
But there are a lot of squishy people in the center who care about stuff and can be convinced, as much as the radicals on either side insist on "with us or against us" logic to avoid ever having to compromise.
Most of humankind lives in a time of unprecedented material abundance, safety, and health. There are problems certainly, but I have to object to this sentiment.
Very much this. At the very least those who are raising the next generation should be sufficiently subsidized by those who decline such that it is, on average, financially neutral.
Reason number one I wrote this is that people were making a bad argument and that always annoys me.
Reason number two is because a lot of people really really want to have kids and it makes me sad to think that some of them are holding back because of a bad argument.
Reason number three is that realistically a lot of the people affected are the most ethically-sensitive and smartest (I know they dropped the ball on this particular question, but I bet in terms of SAT scores or whatever I'm right), and having a bunch of them not reproduce seems bad from a gene-pool-of-the-next-generation point of view.
Reason number four is that my parents asked me to write about this because they think my brother might be avoiding having kids on this basis, although he's kind of reserved about his reasoning and they're not sure.
Glad to see you make the point here and above i.e. reason #3. In fact, to invert this, one could argue that the high IQ/consciousness Ivy student has the opposite moral obligation. That is, they have a moral obligation to have many well-reared children and to direct them towards becoming high-leverage climate scientists, as they have a much higher than normal likelihood of producing offspring with the competence and station necessary to be among the small slice of people that can actually make a large difference.
I have to say that I find it absolutely fascinating that your parents would ask you to write a whole article on a topic out of a mere guess that it may be your brother's motivation, rather than just coming out and asking him for his reasons.
Though I have to say, people who are interested in convincing you to have kids seem to very rarely want to know your actual reasons for that. Or if you tell them they don't listen or don't believe you or simply can't comprehend it.
Which I guess I can understand, because I have that reaction about some things, though I at least do ask the question and try to understand the answers. Though no matter how many times people try to explain to me why they don't like pets or don't have one, or why they love watching sports, I will never truly understand it because they're obviously just wired very differently from me, with very different things hitting their pleasure centers.
"You" meaning Scott? Based on his previous writings, I'm guessing he's annoyed by a bad argument, and hopes that when people make their choices as to whether or not to have kids, they don't take that bad argument into consideration.
My guess is it is less about you and more about something he might be interested in himself, and a debate he has in his own social group. Nt that Everyone Should Procreate.
Since you didn't mention you might not be aware: although it wasn't about climate change, there actually was a very similar movement against having children 50 years ago. There is an All of the Family episode about it. I think Ehrlich's "Population Bomb" and Club of Rome calculations and such were behind it. If there hadn't been, would Trump have won in 2016?
This sort of counterfactual is hard to evaluate, since the political spectrum tends to move to absorb changes at one end or the other and recalibrate towards a 50-50 balance. Maybe Republicans would have been slightly less anti-environment and Democrats would have been slightly more pro-environment but Trump still would have had his distinctive style and won in this slightly shifted political climate.
Or maybe Monica Lewinski would have lost the White House intern application to someone else who wasn’t actually born, and every election since 1996 would have gone differently.
Note that that movement was associate with predictions which we now know were wildly false, at least so far as what has happened so far. It was generally claimed that poor countries would get much poorer unless they sharply reduces population growth. They didn't and global extreme poverty has dropped sharply since then, calories per capita in poor countries risen, not fallen. As with more traditional end of the world cults, the solution is to push the date farther into the future.
I mean, given the World3 projection from the 1970s seems to have followed the built in assumptions even when they updated the model with 2020 information it is clear that the did havve something of a truth to this. Also, one of the largest countries on earth, the People's Republic of China, did constrain their population for that very reason and the govrnment argues its a success in helping the country industialize/get wealthy quicker
Yes, some parts of the world will suffer, but other parts like Canada and Siberia will improve. I’m not sure the we fully understand the pros and cons of this change. Finally, it is important to remember that, on whole, there is no apocalypse.
It's worth noting that the parts of the world that will suffer are the parts where the vast majority of people live, and the parts that will improve are by comparison practically uninhabited. It's not an apocalypse but it's pretty safe to conclude it will do a lot of harm on net.
Good point. It’s just not so clear to me that climate change is the driving factor for the suffering of many. For example, Egypt’s population is set to go from 100M to 200M by 2021 and Lagos is growing by 3000 people a day and neither has the resources to handle the growth. Perhaps we need to consider shifting some populations to mitigate suffering. Of course, we would need a 50-100 year plan and that seems beyond the reach of our leaders. Do we have a climate problem or a leadership problem?
It's not really an either/or. To the extent that any of our problems are solvable by coordinated effort you could say that they're leadership problems, and leadership itself is downstream of other problems. At the end of the day you could blame it all on insufficient virtue and wisdom in the heart of every human. Where does that lead us in terms of finding a solution?
(Maybe you could start writing blog posts about rational thinking and start attracting a small movement of weird nerds...)
The claim that population growth would make poor countries poorer was made with similar confidence in the 1960's, and so far, at least, the opposite has happened — populations continued to grow and poor people became less poor, not more.
you have both. tthe leadership problem is exacerbating the climate problem, to the point that mestiz refugees from say Honduras might just get machine-gunned at the US/Mexican border rather than resettling them in the north of the country and atempting to annex Canada and resettle them there.
It's hard to say how many people will move to the far north. Russia and Canada will probably try to prevent large-scale immigration, but will they succeed?
More speculative: How habitable is Antarctica likely to become?
Antarctica is unlikely to become habitable given that all of it is quite a bit farther south than almost any northern places are north - and even if the edges warm a bit, they will have the strong effect of the ice cap and cold currents around them.
Not in the slightest. Antarctica is covered in 2 miles of ice, and it would take climate change far beyond even the wildest imagination to change that in fewer than 10,000 years.
And in any case, let us not forget that we are living in an ice age right now - since an ice age is usually defined as historical periods when there is permanent ice on both poles. We have been in an ice age for the last approx 2,5 million years, although presently in an interglacial. Life thrived also in periods when both ice caps were absent. So even if Antarctica should become habitable in the VERY distant future, live will go on. Might even thrive - Including us, Africans as we all essentially are.
That is true, and indeed everyone expects the world to be gradually warming and the seas to be gradually rising -- we have about 5m to go before we reach the usual interglacial sea level max, and probably another few degrees before we reach peak temp. But the anthropogenic argument is that the Earth is warming *much faster* that it should be at this point in the interstadial. Whether that is true or not is rather the $50,000 question.
A highly underrated scenario is the outside likelihood that we are avoiding a catastrophe by warming. The idea that an "unnatural" perturbance has an increasing likelihood to cause a warming catastrophe seems much less likely when you consider that the climate already experiences catastrophic cooling regularly. We do not live in a Garden of Eden climate that was perfect and stable as of 1750
While I understand the argument that CO2 warming might actually bring the next ice age closer it seems unlikely to be a net cost on a timescale that includes the next ice age in any case - very particularly if it does in fact both delay and soften it
It doesn't get talked about a lot since Russia is not a rich world destination, but it's the 4rth country globally by absolute # of migrants, behind only the US, Germany and Saudi Arabia. It's hell-bent on population growth at all costs.
E.g. it has a "maternity grant" program which literally pays families for having children - right now the amount is ~6700 USD. Since Russia's GDP per capita is ~10000, proportionally speaking it would be like paying a mother in the US 42000$ to have a kid.
It should be noted that immigration is deeply unpopular among most Russians, casual racism towards the "Southern people" is the absolute norm and the process to citizenship is very convoluted (more so than in most Western countries), while citizenship for both the mother and the child is required to get that maternity grant.
Nonetheless it's true that a great number of people from ex-Soviet republics end up in Russia and contribute a lot to its economy, and it's also true that the introduction of the maternity grant considerably improved Russian birth rate, although it still remains far below replacement.
An outside view would be that heating the planet should make it produce more food. Another one would be that more climate disturbances should add more energy to the system. I'm not saying I agree with either of these sentences, but net positive or negative stances on the effects of climate change aren't the slam dunks people make them out to be.
People should be free to move, Canada and Siberia (even USA) have enough space and raw material to support all of the world’s population now, the only missing needs are energy and technology and technology can provide the energy. Technology is created by people, as are immigration restrictions so there is hope for a solution
I looked into this during a previous California drought and my (very limited) understanding is that alfalfa is an important part of crop rotation in California because it sucks salt out of the ground very effectively. CA starts with high salt content and other crops raise the salt content more, which risks “salting the land” and wrecking the soil. I’m sure there are other crop mixes and intensiveness that could work, but the issue isn’t alfalfa specifically.
I’ve been trying to figure out how much the alfalfa problem is really isolated and how much alfalfa is used as a fallow crop to fix nitrogen for other crops. If the latter, then we would have to account the water use to these other crops. It sounds like you suggest that salt is another reason to account alfalfa in with other crops.
Alfalfa also adds nitrogen to the soil, which most crops typically deplete. It's a natural fertilizer, in other words, and doesn't cause the runoff issues that other fertilizers cause.
Oh fascinating, I didn't realize it's also good for adding nitrogen back. It makes sense, a major benefit of cows is they can eat a wide range of food, so feed can optimize for soil quality relative to other crops.
It's a feedback loop with regards to over-fertilization for other crops and reliance on flood/pivot irrigation that increases soil salinity levels thus requiring alfalfa to be planted. Of course, raising water-intensive crops in the San Juaquin is a topic of discussion for another day.
How about some skepticism re 80-year forecasts. Are there any 1940s forecasts for the 2020s that we now cite as near useful? Forecasts for 2100 presume that we know the future of technology? What are the odds?
Forecasts on the 1280s from the 1200s were very accurate. I suppose the question is whether you feel like we are in a long period of technological acceleration which will continue, or whether we were in a brief 300-year period of technological advancement due to a combination of right conditions which no longer exist (i.e. what Peter Thiel professes).
The world of bits has changed drastically, yes, but the world of atoms is still fairly recognizable from ~1940. None of the following has changed by an order of magnitude: cost of energy, benefits of medicine, cost or speed of transportation, etc.
If we restrict the question to "What was new in science & technology in Western Europe in the 1200s?":
- Arabic numerals & arithmetic (Fibonacci, 1202)
- First book of magnetism (Maricourt, 1269)
- Multiple advances in crane technology: treadmill cranes and stationary harbor cranes
- Mechanical clocks
- Paper mills
- Eyeglasses
- Watermarks
- Spinning wheels
- Functional buttons, with buttonholes, which led to snug-fitting clothing
We could also look at the science & technology which existed in the late 1100s, but spread widely in the 1200s. This spread might have been predicted, although I'm not sure if anyone did:
- Universities
- Gothic architecture (pointed arches, rib vaults, flying buttresses, etc.), which allowed for taller buildings with more windows
- Compasses
- Ships' rudders mounted on the stern
- Blast furnace & cast iron
- Vertical windmills
- Wheelbarrows
- Paper
- Glass mirrors
- Rat traps
- Distilled liquor
There is a lot of technology that we take for granted. At some point, it was invented as was revolutionary at the time. Most centuries have some important technological advances, and these would have been hard to predict beforehand. In particular, the High Middle Ages (~1100-1300) was a period of rapid technological development in Europe.
I doubt that we would cite the old ones because more recent ones would likely be more useful. But I think the relevant question is how many 1940s forecasts are in the right ballpark, even if superseded. What were 1940s forecasts for global population, global economic output, global atmospheric balance, and change in global temperature? I know there was a period in the 1960s when some people thought the ice house cycle might come back soon, but I expect that atmospheric CO2 forecasts were actually pretty decent going back decades.
It looks ominous, but that's because all the short-term daily and seasonal and even annual variation (which is far bigger) has been averaged out. Yikes, a trend! But you know, if we *hadn't* averaged out the daily trend, we could look at the temperature going up from 9am to 12pm and extrapolate that in a week we will all be in danger of evaporating. Clearly absurd, right? But that's what happens when you mistake a fluctuation for a trend, noise for signal.
Here's the problem: we don't know a priori *where* to stop averaging. If we stop at just one day, the season variations drown out any imaginable long-term trend. But if we go all the way up to averaging over centuries or millenia, then the trend since the last Ice Age shows zero sign of human intervention (naturally). If we stop at a few years, say about 5, then we don't see the short-term "noise" but we see what we think of as a "signal" with a characteristic time that is (curiously!) right about the size of our averaging window.
Unfortunately, there's 100% no way to know that's what's going on. We could just be looking at "noise" that simply happens to have a typical period of 10-50 years, and if we wait another century or two, it will jiggle its way back down (and our descendants will perhaps frantically search for something they're doing to cool the Earth). We already know the Earth's temperature experiences fluctuations on time scales from days to hundreds of thousands of years. There *is* no way to tell, just by looking at the temperature data all by itself, whether there is something caused by humans or not. It's like all the manipulations of stock market data that the finance crooks...er..pundits...do to sell n00bs on their wisdom. Look! If I smooth out the 200-day moving average and add back the bias caused by reverse claptrap bazinga, a clear trend emerges...!
That doesn't mean the data is worthless, of course. When *combined* with other data, and a solid mechanism that explains *why* this is the right smoothing window to use, you've got a useful theory. And people who argue global warming competently actually have done those things, so I am not arguing the theory is all crap. What I *am* saying is that people have a good sound basis for thinking that *that graph all by itself* proves exactly nothing.
The more productive adults in the world, the greater the world's wealth. As we get richer, more will be spent on all kinds of technological research including research that mitigates climate change.
Low fertility rates are one of the biggest economic challenges of rich countries. Since concern about the environment is a normal good meaning you care more about it the richer you get, anything making us relatively poorer will cause us to care less on average about climate change.
Citation needed. At least as regards per capita wealth.
What you're saying is clearly false in the limit, because available resources are finite. Given any population growth rate faster than cubic, eventually you will consume all the non-human resources inside a shell expanding at the speed of light. Claims that you'll get warp drive if you just have enough people thinking hard enough about it deserve zero consideration; it's probably outright impossible no matter how much want it.
Given any nonzero rate of technological progress, you will at the same time approach the omega point (where you have already invented and deployed all useful technology).
At that point, you are in a Malthusian condition where you not only get per capita stagnation, but you get an unlimited per capita DECLINE.
The extreme example I give is obviously not imminent or very relevant to current considerations, but it shows that it is not UNIVERSALLY true that more people lead to more wealth. Since it's not universally true, you have to do the work to show that it's true at the present time.
Seriously, as the economy changes resources pop in and out of existence all the time. For example, the North Slope of Alaska 250 years ago only had Caribou, whales, fish, and certain berries and plants as natural resources. Then all of a sudden oil becomes useful and it suddenly contains hundreds of billions of dollars worth of resources. Someday the oil will either run out or will be replaced by alternative energy sources, and it will go back to just Caribou, whales, and fish. Meanwhile some other part of the world will have hundreds of billions of dollars worth of resources appear out of nowhere: maybe somewhere with lots of deuterium if fusion becomes a thing, but certainly something.
From my perspective, if you define resources as "materials useful to mankind" then as time has progressed resources have only increased, not decreased. Can you give me an example of a resource that we stopped using because it disappeared and not because it was no longer as useful as a resource opened up by new technology?
The citation is the theory of relativity. The resources available to you expand no faster than your light cone, which goes with the cube of time. Even if you exploit literally every bit of matter and energy available to you within the laws of physics, make use of every individual quark, lepton and photon, the number of them rises no faster than cubically.
If your population rises faster than cubically, then you will overtake the (per capita) resources inside your light cone. This is a mathematical certainty.
The only way to get out from under that is to either assume that you will get faster than light travel (which you won't), or that you will be able to advance technology and do "more with less"... to the point where the finite number ofl elementary particles available somehow gives you infinite output of whatever you're trying to produce (which it won't).
This isn't some kind of "this is what we've seen in the past" curve extrapolation thing. It's an argument from the actual laws of physics. And it's not from the last palltry 100,000 years, either. We can actually see what's been going on for billions of years, and those laws have always held. We have never seen a natural phenomenon that violates them.
... so I'd say the burden of proof is very firmly on you, and examples from the very short history of humanity aren't a reasonable request.
I think you guys are talking past each other. Nobody is arguing for endless exponential growth rates in either population or GDP.
The argument is that in modern, market-based economies, income and population have tended to grow together, and can reasonably be expected to continue to do so, unless conditions change. The explanation is that on the margin, new technologies, new sources of energy, new ways of creating wealth and new ways of solving human problems have been discovered. For over two hundred years the pace of technological/economic growth has been able to outrun any Malthusian headwinds. People have added or produced more value than they have consumed, on net, and despite an order of magnitude increase in population, incomes have gone up more than 10 fold (closer to 30x in developed nations), lifespans have doubled, health has improved, and freedom, equality of opportunity and education have been substantially improved.
I think you are right that this can’t continue forever. But we aren’t making decisions for eternity. We are talking about the next generation or two, and with these the recent trends are more important than billion-year light cones.
I think JM's comment is correct that the trend has been that wealthier people care a lot more about the climate than poorer people do. They can afford to worry about such broader issues.
Over the foreseeable future, the best course of action IMO would be to continue to grow wealthier and more technologically proficient, and then to use this wealth and technology to fund alternative energy sources and or CO2 extraction.
No, really, I entirely understand their argument. But the thing is that many people, including the person I was initially responding to, seem to like to act as if it's an absolute law of nature that you'll always be able to innovate your way around any major resource problem (or indeed any environmental impact problem; I'm going to lump those with "resource problems" in the rest).
The best argument you ever see for "innovation will always save us" is that it's been true so far. But that's been for a fairly short historical time... and it's treated as a conversation-ending "proof" that it'll be true forever.
So I'm trying to point out that it's CANNOT be forever. At some point conditions WILL change. Once that fact is out there, we can move on to the specific question of WHEN they will change.
The "light cone" argument is just an opener, to challenge the basic "we can grow forever" assumption.
In reality, I very much doubt that the limiting factor is going to be the amount of matter inside a shell expanding at the speed of light. Some other long-lasting, hard-to-avoid, and maybe permanent, resource limitation will probably present itself long before that point. But before that can be discussed, it has to be on the table, which means breaking the assumptin that resources will always be irrelevant.
It's not just hitting new resource limitations, though. In fact, resources are the SMALLER issue from my point of view. The curve can also be thrown off if the innovation slows down. There really is such a thing as a technological omega point. You don't necessarily know where it is until you get to it. You may also find that you approach the omega point for, say, food production or climate remediation, before you get near the "ultimate" omega point.
You can't really tell where you are on a logistic curve until you see an inflection, so trying to project that way is no good. But you CAN see that we have some rather precise mechanistic theories of how physics works. They're incomplete, but the places where they break down are way beyond our current technological operating space anyhow. So there's reason to worry that we may see a serious innovation slowdown. That is not a certainty, but it's a real concern, and history doesn't really serve to allay it.
I truly don't know when either resource or innovation limits will show up, but the conservative assumption is that it will be relatively soon, and the conservative response is at least not to rely on being saved from resource problems that you can actually see coming by new technologies that you can't even specifically name. If you keep rolling the dice like that, someday you'll lose.
I definitely don't think that the next generation or two is entirely off the table as a time to hit some limit that will cause real universal pain. Maybe that's not a reason to give up on reproduction, but it does at least seem like a reason not to get too worried if reproduction goes down. Breathing room is good.
I am also totally unmoved by the idea that you need more population to get more technological innovation to get you out of some hole you're digging. Even if you believe that the population is a linear factor in the "innovation rate", which I don't actually accept, the population is also a factor in the TIME you have available before you badly need the innovations, so at best increasing the population is a no-op.
Thanks, great elaboration. Other than more "breathing room", what would you suggest?
I guess I agree that population and innovation are not very closely tied together, at least so much so that I would recommend more kids as a means to more innovation. I do worry that population reductions can have negative effects on the economy, and that this could slow innovation and technological progress. Even here though, I would rather see more highly educated immigrants than more kids by worried progressives.
Obviously, James meant his statements to apply "at current margins."
Also, if we're really going to invoke relativity here, note that the humans at the edge of the expansion would be traveling near the speed of light and thus have time run more slowly for them. The relevant timeslices, i.e. those corresponding to time as experienced by the humans themselves, actually have infinite volume.
(Not to mention that space itself is expanding... exponentially.)
The offset argument is so obvious that I don’t even understand what the counterargument is. People must assume that it’s impossible to offset emissions.
Most people simply do not think in cost/benefit terms. They think “emissions are BAD therefore you shouldn’t do them” and the idea of paying money to get permission to do a BAD thing seems wrong to them.
Isn’t that particular answer pretty obvious? You cannot offset murder because you are improving society but you cannot do anything to the damages that you inflicted on that single individual. Theoretically carbon emission hurt society and therefore can be immediately rectified directly by offsetting it. A very simple rule would be a directly undoing a harmful act is OK where returning benefit to “society” for a harmful act perpetrated on an identifiable individual is not.
But you have to consider second-order effects on the fabric of society which allowing "murder offsets" would obviously introduce. Or, more pertinently, admit that you can't accurately model such effects, and that naive "shut up and calculate" utilitarianism is unworkable.
There surely were times when murder was a matter of negotiation. Either pay or accept retribution. Not only in Iceland. Next step was communal jurisdiction. The negotiation thing was better than clan wars. Back then, families or clans were working systems and states were nascent. Now there are more or less working states and maybe a nascent earth law.
A lot of people are OK with murdering people that have violated certain laws, like murdering other people. So you could say we are willing offset the murder of a murderer because we think more people will benefit from that murderer not being alive.
First, the cost of offsetting a child's carbon cost is currently very high. Scott brings it down by making assumptions about future technology and suggesting that you would start offsetting when your child is an adult, i.e. about twenty years after the emissions began. If you are seriously worried about climate change destabilizing industrial civilization before the end of this century, then taking carbon out ten years (on average) after it went in probably doesn't seem so great, especially if that strategy is founded on the idea that technological progress will continue on its current trend line. And even Scott's $30,000 figure is too high for some people--that could easily be a 10% or greater increase in the cost of raising and educating a child to a middle class standard, depending on where you live and how much of their own college costs they cover/get scholarships for.
Second, I think you're right that most people are unaware of the idea of offsetting emissions (and other costs), at least as an option for individuals. They may not think it's literally impossible, but it doesn't cross their minds. Certainly almost no prospective parents have looked into its actual cost.
Third, the counterargument to offsets in general (not to paying to remove carbon from the atmosphere or do some other good thing, but to thinking of that as the price for your other behavior) is simple: supposing that I'm willing to spend $X on carbon offsets, why shouldn't I spend the $X and _also_ not raise the (assumed to be net-environmentally-damaging) child? Obviously this generalizes to "Why should I ever do anything for myself rather than for others?", and everyone has to find their own point of balance as far as that question is concerned: a way of roughly minimizing both subjective costs to yourself and material costs to the world. If the subjective cost of abstaining from children is about equal to the market price of the offset, then offsetting it exactly makes sense. If it is much less, then you shouldn't have kids. If it is much greater, than you should have kids and then do something else to fight climate change, but thinking in terms of offsets doesn't get you anywhere in particular.
Those are good points. I think that $30,000 over a lifetime is really low, even if Scott is off by 10x it's pretty easy to achieve - over a lifetime with 50 years of work $300,000 is $6,000/yr. If you look at median salary or average salary that might be a lot but realistically the people pondering not having kids because of climate make much more.
Btw a funny argument is that people with children probably fly less and are more stuck in place and therefore might produce less carbon. My anecdotal experience is that my friends with children probably spend a whole lot less carbon, but I could be wrong.
Generally speaking, the idea of not having children just seems really pessimistic about the value your children will bring into the world. I assume that my children have the potential to bring a lot of positive impact, easily offsetting the carbon that they use.
This would make for a very interesting analysis. I would say in my case, we have travelled a lot less since having our kid. We also eat in the house a lot more, which I am sure reduces carbon, and our entertainment has been more focused on parks and being outside than attractions that would likely have higher carbon footprints. A very interesting thought.
Furthermore, offsetting creates an artificial link between the bad that is done and the good that is done to "offset" the bad. Assume that you think climate change is pretty bad, and a good reason for not having kids (because having kids makes climate change worse) - but not the most important thing, and not the cause where your money can do the most good. Then if having a kid means you suddenly have more money to spend on doing good than before, you shouldn't use it to buy carbon offsets, but instead put it where it yields the most utility. But having a kid, despite believing that it's kinda bad, and "offsetting" that by funding AI risk research or whatever doesn't quite have the same emotional appeal.
My sense is that the people who answer "I am choosing not to have children because of climate change" disproportionately belong to the very-liberal group of "I am a 35 year-old-woman without children yet, and am convincing myself that this was a good conscious decision."
Thank you very much for this article. I am having a hard time lately, and worrying about climate change and how it will affect the future life of my son often made me feel bad, helpless and even irresponsible for having kids at all. I do not have the time or brain to argue with anybody of this friendly community, but I feel obliged to tell you that your thoughts on this topic helped me feel better. Thank you very much!
I'm semi-early here, so pointing out some small text errors; in the Venus paragraph:
> but I don’t think they’d admit to being they’re not 100% sure either
And a little further:
> I think point is true more generally
(I used to not make comments like this because I thought someone else probably will, and it feels insubstantial; turns out, often, no one actually does, and I noticed I take writing that contains simple errors less seriously.)
> In one way we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. ‘How are we to live in an atomic age?’ I am tempted to reply: ‘Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year [...]; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.
> In other words, do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. Believe me, dear sir or madam, you and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented… It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances and in which death itself was not a chance at all, but a certainty.
> [...]
> If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs.
To be clear, this doesn't preclude advocating sensible policies about climate change (or sensible precautions against a virus), any more than C.S. Lewis would have opposed sensible policies about nuclear weapons.
But I think this question of "can I even have children" speaks to a way that people are being eaten by fear over climate change in a way that goes beyond mere sensible policies.
Gosh darn it, I lived through the 70s once already, it would be nice if - like impoverished inspiration in fashion trends - it didn't keep getting recycled.
I am of the generation that had scare stories fed to us that by the time we were all grown up in the year 1980-1990, we'd all be eating rats (or each other) while we froze in our hovels in an overcrowded, resource-denuded planet.
Well, tell me people, when was *your* last meal of frozen rat?
This is just one of the best-sellers of the time (between these, disaster movies, and the fashion sense of the decade, it was sure some experience):
I felt at the time, and I still feel, that a lot of the "it would be terribly irresponsible to have children" rhetoric was based on selfishness. Some of it was based on principle and ideals, certainly, but the people going on about the shrinking resources certainly didn't want to stop having sex, or living comfortable First World Western lives, whereas if they had really meant it they should all have emulated the Desert Fathers.
"Climate change" is just the new "overpopulation", "oil will run out", and the rest of the scary stories of my childhood.
Eh...it's all good. The future by definition will be inhabited by the offspring of people who are today enthusiastic about children, who think whatever comes our way can be worked out, given a bit of hard work and pulling together.
That's pretty much almost everybody already. Very few people defy all three forces on any substantial issue, and an incredibly tiny sliver do so on more than one. We are a very social species. Even our fiercest "dissents" are largely ritualized and functionally vacuous.
My comment is neither optimistic nor pessimistric per se, I'm just observing that the genes that survive to the far distant future are pretty much by definition those that code for aggressive propagation.
But with respect to intelligence, I don't think natural selection has favored that in humans for millenia, at least, probably more like 50-100,000 years or more, since we lived in groups larger than a family. I think over that period natural selection has favored intelligent that hews close to the median, for reasons of social cohesion and belonging. That is probably *why* it's a normal distribution with a rather small standard deviation.
The good news there is that it's likely the future will be no *stupider* in addition to being no more intelligent.
How did you reach the conclusion that higher than average intelligence has not been selected for lately? And how did you determine that intelligence has a small standard deviation?
Well, firstly the IQ distribution is a Guassian, whereas if IQ were a determinative survival advantage I would expect it to have a long exponential tail to the upside, sort of the way the distribution of income in a country does (the so-called Pareto distribution). The fact that IQ drops off far more sharply than an exponential suggests there is some *disadvantage* to being well above the mean intelligence. And I would add personal observation is consistent with that: very smart people in my observation tend to be nontrivially socially disadvantaged, and I can readily believe their reproductive success is lower. We are a very social species, and it seems likely "fitting in" in terms of your attitudes and behavior, and being predictable, are greater reproductive advantages than just being super duper smart.
As for the second, because if we're going to measure intelligence on a universal scale, on which planaria, chimps, humans, and hypothetical Vulcans all fit, then 15 IQ points is a very small width. There's a big empty gap between us and the chimps, and between the chimps and the next smartest species, et cetera.
The fact that intelligence is rather distributed like human height -- where we all cluster around a mean value with a Gaussian distribution reflective of random error in "hitting" the mean -- but nobody is 18 inches high and no one is 14 feet high -- would suggest to me that intelligence, like height, is a "design" characteristic: we are designed to be IQ 100, just as we are designed to be a certain height and giraffes a different height. And as I said, that makes sense from the point of view of a highly social species where reproductive advantage depends critically on social value, and more on the success of collective ventures than individual brilliance, at least over the long term and in the absence of extraordinary threat/opportunity.
Oh, you don't need to convince me that high intelligence is currently not being selected for in Western societies; I'm already quite convinced that we are currently undergoing selection for lower intelligence, as the negative correlation between educational attainment and fitness is well established. But that does not mean that there hasn't been selection for higher intelligence during the last 100k years, and I wonder what explanation other than selection for higher intelligence you propose for the differences that exist between populations that have split within that timeframe.
I'm in that same generation, and I remember NO such scare stories. None. Not with those dates attached. Not unless you count speculative fiction or obviously sensationalistic tabloid-style media bullshit, which would be unfair and unreasonable to do in the context of a serious discussion. Actually, for 1980-1990, I don't think I ever even saw anything like that in in media, only fiction.
I do remember being seriously told by some Time-Life book that I'd be able to buy a ticket to the moon by 1985, but not that there'd be an environmental collapse by then.
As for reality, these things play out over centuries.
On that timescale, and even if you freeze things at the current population and the current per capita impact, the jury is still out about whether we're over one or another of the critical carrying capacities... and, if we are, on whether there's anything we can do about it just by feasible modifications to the "impact" term. A planet doesn't fall apart that fast.
The population scare was going in the sixties, when Ehrlich wrote _The Population Bomb_ claiming that there would be famines in the 1970's with hundreds of millions dead, and it was already too late to stop it. That was at the high end of population orthodoxy at the time, but clearly being taken seriously.
Oy. Were you at an Antarctic research station for the entirety 1971-80? You don't remember "Silent Spring," the movie "Silent Running," the Energy Crisis, Nuclear Winter, mercury in the tuna, Love Canal, Greenpeace boats ramming Japanese whalers, Earth Day? Here's a trip down memory lane:
Yes, I at least remember all of those things. No, I don't remember any one of those things saying that I was going to be living in a hut and eating frozen rats. I don't remember of them coming anywhere close to involving any scenario anhthing like that.
Silent Spring: I didn't read it, but as I recall it was about DDT wiping out birds by thinning eggshells. Yes, it was probably overblown. Yes, a total ban on DDT was probably an overreaction. On the other hand, the amount of DDT that was being thrown all over the place really was a problem. More nuanced controls might have been better than a ban, but a ban was probably better than the status quo. And there was no claim about frozen rats.
Silent Running: Isn't that some kind of submarine movie? Like, fiction? I didn't see it. I thought it was about nuclear submarines, actually. Did it presuppose a nuclear war as a precondition for whatever I was talking about? Was there a nuclear war that I didn't notice? Because if there was no nuclear war, it's kind of irrelevant.
Energy Crisis: Again, no claim about frozen rats. There were sure some pretty high gas prices. And sure enough, Jimmy Carter was dead right about it being dumb to become increasingly dependent on oil. That's caused real problems ever since, not with shortages so much as with getting into wars you don't want to get into. Oh, and of course there's the whole climate change thing now, so it's still a problem even after spending the effort to develop domestic sources. It's a shame people didn't actually follow through more. It's also a shame Cart and others made the anti-nuclear mistake, but that was a bit more understandable at the time.
Nuclear Winter: I guess that might have had frozen rats, but it was also kind of conditional on, you know, nuclear war. Which I still don't remember happening.
Mercury in the tuna: Fish still have not-necessarily-ideal levels of mercury, to the point where people are told to limit consumption... although the rules are probably a bit over-conservative. But even if the mercury doesn't matter at ALL and the rules are totally unsupportable, I still don't remember that either I or the tuna were ever supposed to be reduced to eating frozen rats.
Love Canal: Local issue. Never any claims about frozen rats even locally. I understand it was a genuine mess if you lived there, though.
Greenpeace: So many species of whales were NOT hunted nearly to extinction? And there isn't STILL a consensus that there need to be tight restrictions to keep that from happening? That's news to me, because I thought all of that actually happened. In any case, I don't eat a lot of whale and would be unlikely to substitute frozen rats.
Earth Day: Were there frozen rats on sticks at the hippie fairs? I didn't go.
Well, if we average Deiseach's hyperbole and your oh-shucks-you-mean-*that* minimization, we come pretty close to my memory of the 70s. So that's progress.
Part of the problem is distinguishing between the science and the popular media presentation. If you actually read the IPCC reports, they are not predicting catastrophe, just some bad things happening. But the popular version has climate change threatening at least civilization, possibly species survival. I think there was a similar division in the sixties with regard to population, with Ehrlich's hundreds of millions starving to death in the seventies at the high end of respectable opinion.
Oh, by the way, a lot of those things actually provoked action. If we're standing on the train tracks, and you remark that a train is coming, and so we both step off of the tracks and the train misses us, then I don't get to complain afterwards that you were panicking about the train.
I remember our family having a copy of "The Population Bomb" in the 1970s, predicting gigadeath famines in the 1980s. And I remember high school in the early 1980s, being taught the same thing but with the collapse of civilization pushed back to the 1990s unless we did everything exactly right (meaning world socialism and extreme austerity). I also remember that they gave us the "Club of Rome" model to play with, convinced that we would be convinced by the sciencey truthiness of a Genuine Computer Forecast that this was inevitable no matter what we did, and then figuring out what relatively straightforward technological developments would nonetheless enable a hundred years of continued growth. IIRC the teacher let me pass that class with a C-.
And of course I remember what Soylent Green is made out of.
It was absolutely a thing, and not an isolated or obscure thing, in the 1970s.
the world3 model is still relevant, given they pdate it in 2020 and it still gave the same results. also i would prefer not leaving existential threats to the species to a "someone will fix it" thing.
Correct. And it goes back a good deal farther — the scare that drove the eugenics movement was that the stupid were outbreeding the smart, I think a little earlier was running out of topsoil.
" The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace in a continual state of alarm (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing them with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."
The population bomb was avoided by the green revolution, as well as the policies of countries like Chhina which suggests there was something of a 'notiin and avoiding a problem'. And countries *do* have famines.
Thanks for this article, Scott - I have a few friends who want kids themselves, but who have found themselves being talked down to by joyless scolds who will denounce them (to their faces, in public) for wanting to have kids, and insisting they would be deeply wrong to do so, for climate-related reasons. (I hope people like this are not also problems in other people's circles.)
I've shared this article with them, and I hope it'll be helpful to them. We'll see - the apocalypts might be beyond persuasion, but still, this should add a little more sanity to the conversation. So, thank you once again.
This is part of the “argument” about getting climate change predictions right where the result of underestimating the damage and not being willing to incur ANY cost at all and overestimating the damage and taking counterproductive steps – measure that cost more than the damage they prevent. So far this has not happened on any big scale that I know of, but it could and “not having children” would fall into that category.
Within this argument however, there is a sub argument in which overestimating the damage leads to rejecting the least cost way of avoiding the damage – a net tax on CO2 emissions (and use of that parameter in guiding public investments that affect CO2 emissions) because, paradoxically, a tax as seen as “too little” and a sure sign that the proposer does not take climate change "seriously."
There’s a niche population in which carbon taxes are seen as unserious. But that population is shrinking. The bigger problem the carbon tax faces is that median voters hate it with a passion and are far more willing to vote for things that hurt themselves more, like bans on coal or other strict regulations, as long as the costs are slightly hidden.
Having a hard time writing replies here that aren’t full of snark and anger. Thank you, Scott, for being a good example of writing positive, earnest arguments against our atrocious intellectual leadership, and their terrible arguments.
Muad'Dib: "If a child, an untrained person, an ignorant person, or an insane person incites trouble, it is the fault of authority for not predicting and preventing that trouble."
If bad beliefs are widespread, to me this is, de facto, the fault of intellectual leadership.
This is why I would hate living in the Dune universe. I have no need for any God-damned intellectual leadership, I am perfectly capable of thinking leading thoughts all by myself, and moreover if those thoughts don't quite comport with the Zeitgeist, I insist -- the the point of rudeness, if not a poke in someone's eye with a sharp stick -- on the liberty of having them anyway, and to hell with what the majority thinks or prefers.
On the other hand, I *would* really like some competent managers who can ensure that the potholes are fixed, air-traffic control is efficient, borders are secure, weights and measures uniform, court cases speedily adjudicated -- all the kind of plain-jane work-a-day stuff for which we constituted government circa 1776. No genius required, just attention to detail and duty.
Alas, it seems these days I get tons of "intellectual leadership" from the folks I send to the capital -- lotsa speeches about How Things Ought To Be, and The Right Kind of Thinking -- and precious little of getting the maintenance work done on time and under budget. Bah.
I share your preferences here. But i get the impression that most people don't, because these are unpopular preferences.
What do you think of the argument that "leadership of _some kind_ is inevitable, because most people outsource much of their thinking to others, and this really just makes sense as another form of specialization?"
Personally, i would prefer that if we did have intellectual leaders, they be consistent winners of vibrant prediction markets. That's the only kind of leadership i'd be willing to listen to.
Yes, political leadership is inevitable. I'm torn between desiring it be the most incompetent racked with pox and cupidity, on the one hand, so that The People, bless their hearts, are scarred enough to avoid some of the deadlier strains of the collectivist nightshade poison, and desiring it be some selfish but canny bastard who will use the power entirely for his own welfare but begrudgingly pave the streets and keep the post office running in order to buy time for his get-rich schemes to mature. The predations of the scurriless are as nothing compared to the havoc wreaked by the noble pursuers of Justice For All so the cost doesn't bother me -- the US Federal Government could afford a President who handed out $100 million/year sinecures to his 10 best friends annually forever, and it would be a bargain compared to the latest Great Quixote Society project doomed to fail only after sending $5 trillion in good savings up in flame. I dunno, I don't have any great ideas. In the 1900s you could up sticks and move to America, where they mostly left you the hell alone, but there's no where to go now.
I would be much much much more pessimistic about the world if not for bitcoin. Because bitcoin does exist, i am optimistic that the world will 'fall into' a more libertarian state of affairs. Not that people will vote for it, or that "experts" will be necessary to make it happen - this is based upon a belief that the means of life you are describing ultimately outcompetes other forms, but it simply requires sufficient technology which previously didn't exist.
The existence of bitcoin means it's now possible to hold and transmit large amounts of value without relying on any state authority or court system. That is a complete game-changer in terms of what it means for communities of human beings who simply want to live and work in peace.
Bitcoin brings the kind of tax-avoidance schemas once only available to the super-rich, to everyone. It makes confiscatory approaches impossible to scale, because now you can transact globally without relying on any one company. You can save several lifetime's worth of earnings, and if you do it right, nobody will know you have it. And if someone wants to steal from you, they can't do so without your concent. They could _kill_ you, but they still couldn't take that value from you. Bitcoin dramatically lowers the incentive for committing violence, and raises the cost of warfare. We printed enough money in the last two years, to fund something like afghanistan wars.
I think the end result of all this will be a flight of capital away from coercive systems of control, and thus a newer, more peaceful, more cooperative future. Power will largely be held locally, and it'll be impossible to cobble together coherent hierarchies without everyone involved agreeing that they want to be in the hierarchy, since the cost of defecting will go down _dramatically_.
I found a very similar quote from *Jessica* Atreides in Dune, but speaking specifically of the little troublemaker Alia rather than generic "children".
It sounded vaguely like one of those things Paul said in the many meetings of the Imperial Council that were written about in the two (immediate) sequels. He used to say things that would scandalize Irulan, and sort of indirectly his "conventional square" readers of the early 70s, and that would be one of them.
The Founders Pledge, which is extremely committed to fighting climate change, produced a report that effectively reaches the same conclusion. Seems very relevant to share here.
3. We are not saying that you should or shouldn’t have children: We mostly discuss this example since it has been discussed heavily in prior work and we believe prior analyses have significantly overstated the impact of this choice."
If carbon footprint is the determining factor, then why is nuclear energy so reviled? The constant marginalizing of nuclear energy by imposing unbearable burdens of costly regulations far beyond those which are reasonable forces the use of fossil fuels. The carbon impact of substituting fossil fuel with nuclear for power generation is massively beyond that of any realistic decrease in nativity. Presuming people are rational, this would point to anti-natalism being the true motivation behind the push to reduce birthrates.
It is rationally impossible to take pleas for decreasing carbon output seriously when the only real alternative is a-priori banned from consideration. This is a quagmire of the self-designated pro-environment movement's own creation. Lobby gov to impose impossible regulatory burdens on nuclear energy, making fossil fuel the only economically viable alternative for stable power generation, then wail about how fossil fuels are destroying the world. Zero credibility.
If I'm being charitable, the problem is that those who overregulate nuclear power while decrying climate change are caught between two competing motives. The first, more well established, motive is that climate change is very bad and we should do something about it such as swapping away from fossil fuels. The second motivator, though, is that nuclear disasters are very flashy and high-profile. No one wants to be the company running the next Fukushima, and nobody wants to be living in the next irradiated area.
Scott has written about similar effects in the medical industry in the past, where drugs known to cause slight increases in heart attacks are prescribed so often that it's practically certain that some deaths are a result of the drug, but nobody will prescribe a drug that has orders of magnitude less chance to cause sudden liver (iirc) failure. The increase in heart attacks blend into the background noise, but the flashy organ failure can be easily blamed on an individual doctor's choice of prescription.
Obviously there are ways to mitigate the danger of nuclear energy, and I agree that we really need to start using it. But as long as people don't want to risk a careless worker upending their lives, it's going to be hard to convince some people that this actually is a great option. In the mean time, we'll have to settle for other options for green energy.
The less charitable view would probably look similar, except it would assume less intelligence on their part and quickly dissolve down to something like "I don't want a Chernobyl-style meltdown in my city!" That, or a herd mentality where they talk about renewables and not nuclear because that's all they ever hear talked about.
Well we have to, otherwise why bother even speaking? But the point is taken. Perhaps I can rephrase it as "To the degree we can presume people are rational, this would [...]".
Among the people for whom carbon footprint is a major consideration, I don’t think nuclear power is reviled at all. The people who revoke nuclear power are people who think lots and lots of other things trump carbon footprints, and who have an inaccurate view about the direct harms of various energy sources.
That would seem to be the actual point. Those who revile nuclear power desire to shoe-horn many other things into an alleged attempt to reduce carbon footprint. The problem being that those who don't like the 'many other things' end up resisting the carbon reduction too, because of all the other things that have been arbitrarily included in the package.
It would seem that those for whom the carbon footprint of mankind is in fact the main consideration are in the minority, since the massive power-grab being attempted in the name of carbon reduction has not even tried to unpack the stuff that has been added on.
I am very concerned about carbon emission and the unrecoverable loss of free oxygen, but the intentional politization of the question has caused fatal harm to the goal of carbon reduction.
If that is the case, I wonder if the movement serves similar geopolitical purposes as did the disarmament movement did, rather than the purpose most of its genuine adherents believe it serves?
It is widely reviled in large part because it is widely believed to be insanely dangerous at approximately the same level that climate change is believed to be insanely dangerous. This belief is false, and clearly false in a way that concerns about the reliability of IPCC reports are not. But most people can't reasonably assess either an IPCC report or a nuclear energy safety assessment (or a Phase III clinical trial of a vaccine, for that matter); they have to just trust a respected authority to do it for them and eventually file it under "this is just plain true and only liars ever say otherwise, so don't listen to them".
How we got to that place is irrelevant, and I don't feel like playing the blame game today. If there were a quick or easy way to get back from that place, that would be relevant but I don't know of any. If there are presently people who know better but are inciting nucleophobia for cynical or otherwise hidden motives, that also would be relevant but I don't think it is presently a major factor. Mostly, people are erroneous but sincere.
The argument my wife and I settled on was "it's bad for civilization to have a demographic crash at precisely the time it's trying to transition to a carbon-free economy". I still think this is a potent argument, but I think Scott's political one is more urgent.
I find it completely implausible that anyone *actually* has or doesn't have children because of climate change, regardless of what they may say on the subject. People rationalize a whole lot of stuff they do in response to subterranean primitive drives or personal desires with fancy philosophical arguments, and I would assume without strong contrary evidence that's what's going on here.
If you don't want to have kids because you haven't yet grown up yourself, or you're incapable of forming the necessary sexual attachment, or your own family provides a horrifying warning example, then it would seem considerably more psychologically comfortable to assert that the reason is a noble selfless concern for the impact on the general welfare. Ego-defense bullshit seems a far more economical explanation for the data than a shocking increase in the degree to which the canonical American considers the impact on Bangladesh of his lifestyle choices.
Sure, but it's also where you'd find people with a superb ability to rationalize emotional drive as actually really the epitome of cool reason, so...kind of a wash, really. Intellectuals are like that. Generally capable of amazing insight into others, but also frequently more naive about their own true motives than people 2 standard deviations in IQ below. When you have a brain that can use language and logic exquisitely, it can be used to peel away the layers of bullshit other people construct to obscure things they find embarassing, but of course it can also be used to construct obscuring layers of bullshit around those things *you* find embarassing. Double-edged sword.
A related and weirder population argument is that the more people there are, the worse that climate austerity will have to be. If we have too many kids, they’ll have to live in apartments and ride bicycles. Better that they not even exist, so that their siblings can have lives worth living, i.e. giant houses in the exurbs and SUVs.
Strongly agree with the thrust of this argument, but I think you don't go far enough in 2 places:
1. Do those maps of sea level rise assume no human acts to mitigate it? Plenty of places today are below sea level but still dry. Manhattan real estate surely must be valuable enough that we'd do more dutch-style water management, rather than give up billion-dollar skyscrapers?
2. Economic growth is continuing alongside climate change. Even if it does cost trillions of dollars, future generations are likely to be far richer, not poorer, than we are.
I've seriously wondered about this first point too. If the Dutch in the Middle Ages could make half a country, if you can stand next to skyscrapers in Boston built on what used to be water, is it really that hard to protect 10% of Manhattan, or Miami for that matter? The answer might well be yes, maybe it's easier to build new land above sea level than protect buildings on what becomes lower than sea level, but it doesn't seem obviously true to me either way.
The big risk with Climate Change is that we may devote tremendous resources towards the wrong mitigation, or that the measures selected may make actually make things worse.
The cost of land reclamation, or sea walls is tiny compared to the costs of 'de-carbonification'. But building a levee will actually solve a problem, while there is no guarantee that upending the global economy will change the climate to a helpful degree.
What we do know for sure is that prematurely ceasing fossil fuel use is almost guaranteed to immiserate millions of people.
Yes that is absolutely right. Most of New Orleans is currently below sea level. However, at a certain point, the costs of protecting some land become greater than the costs of abandoning it. It’s unlikely to trace the lines indicated in these maps, but these maps at least give you an indication of the cost.
And in any case, Scott’s point here is that these lines on the map are the upper bound on how much land is lost given reasonable sea level forecasts, and if the truth is less than that, then it strengthens his point that life is still worth living, even if the lower east side is smaller than you remembered as a kid.
Definitely agreed, it's an upper bound as you say. I would be delighted to reduce that upper bound further, is all; I think the vision of city blocks being lost to the sea is a powerful and motivating one, and if it's false I'd want to know.
My intuition is that urbanised land is so valuable that for any realistic amount of sea level rise, we'll be able to protect it rather than see it flood - but I'm a no-nothing outsider so I'd be very interested to find what the expert consensus is on this.
For many creatures, difficult times lead to lower fecundity. Humans are no exception. The excuse of climate change gives delicious feelings of self-righteous, moral sacrifice, but I'd assume most people are actually foregoing procreation because now it is more acceptable to be childless. And the expectations for parenting are getting ridiculous. In California, rising living costs are making solidly middle-class jobs like teachers or nurses into low-class jobs. So if you want your kid to have the American dream you have to be sure he becomes an MD or a programmer.
This is a slight tangent, but my friend AB pointed out to me that CO2 itself is poisonous even at sub-1% concentrations. And is projected to get to approximately that concentration in the next century.
So there's a question here: are we being dumb? Or on current projections will the atmosphere really become poisonous without us doing something drastic? At current-best-carbon-capture technology we'd need to spend a fair portion of the world's GDP exclusively on it, which I guess is perfectly do-able... and I guess it gets much cheaper when you increase concentrations... but...
More interestingly, the meta-question: why don't I hear about this from anywhere? It's very scary (rising sea levels just mean you move somewhere higher if you're rich -- the atmosphere being toxic means you die or we live in a dystopia where you don't go outside) but also DOESN'T REQUIRE man-made global-warming... even if man-made-global-warning doesn't exist, this effect is still there and is still even scarier than anything you get from man-made-global-warming. It's also obvious (unless the answer to the question above is "yes, you're an idiot") -- and you can't solve it WITHOUT solving man-made-global-warming... It seems like a much better argument to me than anything else that is being used. So what gives?
> CO2 itself is poisonous even at sub-1% concentrations
This is not at all well established. (How did you come to accept it as fact?) Which is why it's not widely reported. There were a few studies claiming cognitive decline at <1%, but so far the evidence level isn't strong.
Indoor CO2 concentrations are regularly much higher than atmospheric concentrations. If there is a toxicity problem, it will be indoors. If indoor air isn’t often toxic today, then atmospheric air won’t be for centuries. Maybe increased atmospheric concentrations will make it easier for indoor air to reach toxic levels. But the effects of direct CO2 toxicity to us are surely less than the heating effects, the ocean pH effects, and probably a few other effects we also are ignoring.
Well your friend AB is wrong. The CO2 concentration inside your own lungs is way higher than that already. CO2 is poisonous at above 20-40% concentration, yes, even in the presence of sufficient oxygen, for reasons that aren't entirely clear. But at 1%? Nonsense. Submariners breathe that concentration and more for 6 months at a time.
I don't think you're going far enough, Scott. If the economy continues to grow at 2% a year, our grandchildren will live lives much better than ours, even while able to spend trillions on climate mitigation measures every single year.
I hear these folks saying that choosing to not have children is a sign of moral/emotional deficiency.
Admittedly, I have chosen to not have children, and mostly because I didn't want to. It seemed to me that children were a great deal of work and the job should be left to people who had a strong desire to do it.
I consider myself very fortunate to have lived in a time and place when I was free to choose to not have children.
When I hear people say that if anyone chooses to not have children, it must be because of laziness or selfishness, I suspect they believe having children is a bad deal, a lot of work for insufficient reward, and they don't want other people to get away without suffering as much.
Please note, I'm not talking about people who are happy to have children, or even people who are happy to have children and believe it would be a good idea for everyone. I'm talking very specifically about the people who attack those who choose to not have children.
As a parent of many children, I heartily applaud anyone who makes a clear-headed decision not have kids. Being a parent is *hard* and doing it well means sacrificing a *lot* of personal desires. Don't get into it if you can't fully commit to all of the drawbacks.
If people who want children say those who don't are rationalizing their lack of courage/willpower/emotional stablility, one can of course reply that all arguments for having children are rationalizations for the selfish primal desires of propagating one's genes, or whatever.
But in the end, everyone will just feel more angry and superior, and the debate will not have progressed in the slightest
Out of curiosity, were/are you married and did you and your partner decide to not have kids? Or have you been single and decided to never pursue a relationship that would have had the potential to yield children?
I'm sort of one of the people you're addressing here, in that I don't want kids and the climate is *one* reason why not.
The core reason this is all "correct but not the way I think about it" is that for me, and I assume for most people, the decision to have children is almost purely an emotional one. Practical considerations weigh in - for example, I simply couldn't afford a child without substantial hardship for many years - but they could be overcome if the emotional case was there. I'm aware that's not a rationalist position, but I think it's fair to say that having a kid is a case where emotion should play a big role.
Climate is an excellent proxy for the overall "how does the future *feel*" component of this emotional decision. The emotional case just feels bad. I don't feel positive about the future, and even being a privileged resident of the first world seems tenuous and subject to change within a generation. I'm not confident that the US will be immune to deprivation and violence in the decades to come, especially for those who aren't wealthy.
You claim with the CA water example that if people are suffering from basic privation, resource allocations will change. I think this is probably true in an aggregate/stable long-term state sense, but there are already counterexamples - access to safe water is *already* a major problem for millions of Americans, and the response has been very angry but extremely inadequate in any practical terms.
California also suffers from a shortage of another basic need - housing - and their responses to that blatant crisis have ranged from tepid to actively harmful for at least 20 years. It reminds me of that quote about the stock market - "the market can remain irrational longer than you can stay solvent." Could it take CA 20 years to stop devoting its water to alfalfa while the poor suffer? Yeah... that seems extremely plausible.
This is well said: "Climate is an excellent proxy for the overall "how does the future *feel*" component of this emotional decision."
I wonder if in prior eras that people who felt less confident, more anxious, more pessimistic about their future and their potential children's capacity to flourish in it had those doubts swamped by social pressure to procreate. But as that social pressure has decreased over time, it allows more room for people with those sorts of feelings to let those feelings lead rather than what would have previously been the larger fear of social ostracism.
In prior eras, if people felt pessimistic about their future and their potential children's capacity to flourish in it, did they regard that as a reason not to have children? Or rather as a reason to have many children, so that at least some of them survive?
> I’d guess maybe a 1% chance that we end up like Venus.
Note that this guess massively overestimates things.
Yes, technically on scale of about 1 billion years it will happen (due to Sun increased output).
But chance of "we end up like Venus" happening within 200 years are zero.
Or basically zero if you give space for stuff like "Sun increases power by 50% for some unexpected, unpredicted and very unlikely reason" or "aliens visit and fuck with us".
Again, I think 99% chance you're right, but I'm curious why you are so sure there isn't going to be some kind of horrible runaway global warming where increased temperatures cause increased release of methane from deposits in a vicious cycle that ratchets us up to Venus really quickly. Is it because you haven't heard that theory or because you've seen really good evidence against it?
Good point. There's a lot of space between "miserable climate on Earth for most people" and a genuine moist runaway greenhouse. Things can get really bad for a lot of people without literally becoming uninhabitable.
The really good evidence against it is that it hasn't happened in the last 4.5 billion years. Systems that are stable over that length of time have to have pretty powerful restoring forces that keep them in equilibrium. Also, the CO2 necessary to convert the Earth to Venus is locked up in sedimentary rock, it could not re-emerge on timescales less than millions of years.
And over the last 4.5 billion years there have been times with substantially higher temperature and CO2 concentration than projected for the next century.
Then again, outside the argument, I have to add: "What's the probability that our understanding of past temperatures and CO₂ concentrations is horribly wrong? What's the probability that my personal understanding of how these figures should be interpreted (e.g. how certain we are about them), and what they mean about the present (e.g. what differences there are between those eras and the present) is horribly wrong?"
I've just been looking at the discussion of past temperatures in the new IPCC report. Their estimate for the PETM, about 55 million years ago, is that average temperature was 10°C-25°C warmer than 1850-1900, which is their usual baseline. Even the low estimate is well above anything the IPCC projects for the next century, I think the next two centuries but haven't checked.
I would also be careful about the rhetoric used here. A lot of people interpret 50% to mean: we don't really know. Also, a lot of people interpret 1% to mean - small chance, but still, there's a chance. It is usually much better to interpret risk, especially of unlikely things, on a logarithmic scale. And the chance that we suffer Venus's fate any time soon is not easily quantified, but is likely orders of magnitude less than 1%. My best guess (I'm informed about this stuff to some degree, but not an expert) would be in the range of 0.01% to 0.0000001%.
As a quick example, here's a kind-of-recent article from James Kasting furthering his work that suggests that even if we hit Venus level concentrations of C02 (highly unlikely), we still wouldn't get a runaway effect.
Certainly it is contentious and we can't perfectly model the future (including how much stored methane might be released from permafrost), but (likely) overstating the risk lends itself a bit too well to the catastrophizing mindset that already plagues the climate discussion (and causes many people to not have kids, or to tune things out entirely, or to adopt a distrust of the topic specifically and science generally).
Where are we going to get 90 bar of CO2? If you burned down *all* terrestrial vegetation and *all* known or imagined fossil fuel deposits, you'd boost atmosphere CO2 by a factor of ~5, i.e. from 400ppm to 0.2%. That leaves 89.8 bar to go. Even if you somehow pulled all of the CO2 from the oceans (which is impossible, as it is in equilibrium with the atmosphere) you would only get up to about 2% CO2. The only way you can get to Venus levels of CO2 is to pull out the CO2 from the petatonnes of carbonate sedimentary rock, which is where almost all of the Earth's primordial CO2 is stashed.
Ah...well, were we to evaporate all the oceans that all by itself would inject a phenomenal amount of heat into the atmosphere, the heat capacity of water being what it is. Since it all has to leave by radiation, no convection of course, I imagine the Earth would remain at an average temperature of 100C for a very long time, maybe thousands of years. So who needs a greenhouse effect?
I think there's enough CO2 on Venus to do the job, but the transport might be tricky. It would need to keep up with natural processes (e.g. photosynthesis, carbonate rock formation in the deep ocean) that remove the CO2. I think on the whole the best approach would be to set up enormous solar-powered limekilns and just, say, roast the entire Dolomites and dump the lime into the sea. Still a challenging transport job, but at least it's hundreds instead of hundreds of millions of km, and not through vacuum.
I am not certain, but 1% of chance seems extremely, extremely, extremely high.
From my understanding even doing things like "burn all fossil fuels, release clathrates, release all CO2 locked in permafrost" AND "Yellowstone erupts" AND "Chicxulub-sized impact" together would be not enough to trigger it.
(not an expert, let me know if there is some serious argument that it may happen - but for example IPCC is basically going "lol, no" on that)
Yes, we may be missing something but as far as I am aware this scenario is not treated as something serious.
It is in class of "unexpected supersized long-term comet strikes Earth directly", "LHC generates black hole that eats Earth", "works by H. P. Lovecraft were a documentary", "aliens invade", "detonation of the first nuclear bomb ignites atmosphere" - not outright impossible, but describing that as "1% chance" would be really panicking and overstating problem.
Yes, there is chance that we will be directly hit by Shoemaker–Levy 9 comet, but sure as hell it is far lower than 1%.
> Over the next six days, 21 distinct impacts were observed, with the largest coming on July 18 at 07:33 UTC when fragment G struck Jupiter. This impact created a giant dark spot over 12,000 km (7,500 mi) across, and was estimated to have released an energy equivalent to 6,000,000 megatons of TNT (600 times the world's nuclear arsenal)
> global warming causes collapse of entire civilization below medieval or ancient levels, back to the stone age, over 99% population dead - within lifetime of children born in 2021
and even that would be mostly things like nuclear war triggered by political tensions caused by global warming.
Yes, and it even works in this specific case as an argument.
But "1% chance of turning Earth in Venus, with greenhouse effect strong enough to melt lead and zinc on surface" is horrifying. And enough to panic.
Actual risk of that is far far lower.
And people here are quite likely to take action based on "1% of something horrifying" so I wanted to note that it is not 1% of Venus, that is not going to happen[0].
[0] Due to action of humans with current tech or currently predictable tech - multigenerational spaceships and colonization of entire Milky Way galaxy is more likely than this.
Venus is right out, at least as an "oops we burned too much fossil fuels" accident. Venus is what it is because it underwent a runaway greenhouse effect before its wimpy excuse for early oceans and plate tectonics could lock up all its carbon in the form of carbonate rocks. The carbon you'd need to turn Earth into Venus, can't be obtained by burning fossil fuels (or liberating methane clathrates or whatever) because almost all of it was turned into boring non-burnable rock before it had a chance to turn into coal.
I went through this with Ph.D. climatologist William Hyde back in the rec.arts.sf.* newsgroups of legendary usenet in the before times, and we had lots of fun figuring out what it *would* take to turn Earth into Venus. I wish I could find that old post, but google's usenet search kind of sucks. It was a glorious little SFnal scenario, in which an extremely focused omnicidal dictatorship ruled the Earth for about a thousand years, devoting its full wealth and capability to mining carbonate rocks and stacking it in Everest-sized piles, while building ginormous nuclear furnaces. The very last generation of humanity retreated into refrigerated subterranean bunkers to keep the furnaces running and operate the bulldozers that would endlessly push stockpiled rock into their maws, where nuclear fire (nothing else will plausibly do) liberates the eons-old carbon. Well, endlessly until the refrigerators fail.
*That* gets you to the point where the oceans evaporate, and the rest of the process can proceed on its own unto Venus. Just burning fossil fuels, even with the worst plausible feedbacks, might get you late Paleocene Earth.
Matt Yglesias touches on this in One Billion Americans (the rest of which was also great). He argues that climate change can only be solved by technological progress. Even if America cut its population by 50%, there are billions of people in south Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa whose lives are rapidly improving, and therefore will see their emissions per capita increase. It's unethical to try and thwart this improvement in their lives, and so the only way to fix climate change is through technological innovation. And the best way to achieve innovation is with *more people* not less. Yglesias therefore encourages policies to make it easier for Americans to have children, but to increase immigration to the largest technologically innovative economy.
Eli Dourado has also been writing extensively in this same space. I wish the technological innovation view point would become mainstream. We have solutions to many of the technological problems, but we don't have them to the regulatory ones. Its quite distressing.
> Then they divided all these generations of future carbon production by the number of years you personally would live, and said it would produce 60 tons of carbon per year.
This actually makes me really angry.
Working around GHG calculations and offsetting, it is really important to understand that emissions at different times are not perfectly inter-temporally substitutable. No matter your methodology for carbon valuation, you will price emissions at different times at different costs/values, to reflect changes in the climate, society, and technology. The emissions associated with my great-great-great-grandchild are *meaningless* in the framework we need to operate in. KN [scientist] acknowledges this - so why publish something so skewed?
Good points, but I have to question the methodology on per capita emissions by state/DC. It seems likely that these numbers are based only on generation specifically within the boundary which would creating a misleading impression of standard of living attainable relative to emissions. For example Wyoming imports 14x more energy than it consumes, whereas DC imports almost all of its energy (EIA.gov). 2/3 of DC's electricity mix is fossil fuel https://www.pjm.com/~/media/library/reports-notices/special-reports/20170330-pjms-evolving-resource-mix-and-system-reliability.ashx DC is uses more electricity per capita than 89% of the country, but since it's all imported that seems to not be counted.
This holds true for all the high use states, they export coal or gas, or refine crude oil, to be used in other areas of the country. NY's numbers don't include the carbon from the millions of yards they use annually, steel from Pennsylvania, or the incineration or burial of their rubbish at out-of-state facilities.
I've also always questioned how flights play into this, even though the share of emissions is relatively small. Rural residents do drive much more, but rarely fly. Half the US never flies. Based on my anecdotal experiences in NYC and DC it seems likely that they account for an outsize share of these emissions as well, although I can't find data on this beyond broad emissions stats - https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/10/17/climate/flying-shame-emissions.html
I think that’s a good criticism of these specific numbers. But when you account the costs of flying and such, there’s a question whether the carbon cost of a business traveler should be accounted to the traveler, or to the customers of the company on whose behalf they are traveling. And how to do that accounting for trips that mix work and pleasure.
"I am grateful for my parents’ decisions here and so I conclude that having children in a world with a 1% risk of apocalypse is fine."
I have seen this argument in some other places, but I have never really understood it.
For me, a life has a moral value only if it already exists; that's why I think abortion at the early stages of a pregnancy is clearly more defendable than killing a newborn baby, and contraception is even more harmless.
(Obviously that view brings up the difficult question of when an organism stops being a bunch of cells and starts being a subject, but that question, Aaronson's "pretty hard problem" seems unavoidable anyway)
And on a more subjective note, although I am fortunate enough to have a pretty comfortable, sometimes pleasant life, I can't wrap my head around what it would mean for me to be thankful to my parents for my existence, because I wouldn't miss it I wasn't there.
For me, this gratefulness is as alien as the (much more rarely expressed) resentment for all the hardships that one's parents inflicted them by bringing them to the world. Perhaps even more.
As someone who is quite convinced by anti-natalist arguments, I understand that my moral views are not typical. (By the way, I agree with most of the arguments presented in the post, though I disagree with some conclusions)
But if someone can help me understand the [pro-choice][anti-murder][not anti-natalist] position, it's probably here.
> I have seen this argument in some other places, but I have never really understood it.
> For me, a life has a moral value only if it already exists
What about following
- It is not immoral to not procreate
- Bringing children into world, children who will live a good lives is a good thing
> I can't wrap my head around what it would mean for me to be thankful to my parents for my existence, because I wouldn't miss it I wasn't there.
What about comparing it to being happy about eating a tasty cake received as a surprise gift? Despite that you wouldn't miss if you would not receive it?
There is plenty of things that I like, that I wouldn't miss if they would never exist. I like oak tree outside my window, I do not mis Xeghaha tree outside my window that never existed.
For the first question, I guess part of the problem is determining what we mean by "children with good lives"
But more importantly, I don't really understand how it can be both not immoral to not do something, and a moral good to do it (I think the term is supererogatory)
Maybe that has to do with how how convincing you think Singer is with his arguments about the duty to help the people you can help.
I should maybe add that, to the extent that it's possible to live up to this idea, I don't, but I'm talking about theoretical questions.
As for the second question, I agree that one can appreciate something that one wouldn't have missed, and I admit my argument was at least poorly worded.
I did mean to bring up the idea of counterfactuals: even if you wouldn't miss the tasty cake if you didn't know about it, the fact that you appreciate its existence seems to be linked to the other worlds that your mind considers, in which it doesn't exist.
And (at least on an emotional, heuristic level) you find that the worlds in which you have cake are more pleasant than the worlds in which you don't.
But how can you compare the experiences that you have with the absence of any experience?
I guess if there was a clear, universal "mean" of happiness, I could compare my global happiness to it, but I don't think this idea makes much sense, because some people are happy to continue living in terrible conditions I would definitely not want to be born in. There's also the question of psychological predispositions to happiness, which themselves interact with the environment, and that makes the question even muddier.
I’m not sure I understand the first part of this comment. For example you see somebody lifting a suitcase into the overhead compartment which is a moderate struggle but clearly within their capability. You do not know the individual. I would argue that the choice to offer your assistance falls under the heading of a moral good that would not be immoral to withhold. There are a lot of things that are “nice but not necessary.“
No you're right, there is some nuance to this stuff that I probably could have worked out better.
I agree that in daily life, we can think of some things as supererogatory.
But what we mean is that their utility is close to zero, or that it depends strongly on very subtle differences in the situation that we are not considering in the conversation.
In the example of the luggage, the differences might be how tired you are, how old/tired the traveler seems to be, etc
So it's about levels of analysis
Of course the subtle differences are also present in the "having kids" discussion.
But I feel like, if I were convinced that having kids is a good in itself, just like helping someone with their briefcase is good, I would think of having kids, not as supererogatory, but just good. And I would see the people choosing to not have kids as either wrong or unable to accomplish good things by circumstance.
So, respectively, like someone who would refuse to admit that helping the traveler is a good thing, or someone who can't help them because they're disabled, or in another car, or whatever.
In other words, I don't think I would use the level of analysis at which it makes sense to think of actions as supererogatory.
I think the pro-choice, anti-murder, pro-natal or natal-neutral position works like this:
People on average live good lives, with net positive utility, but it is possible to live a bad life, with net negative utility (either because they are miserable or because they are hurting others). If someone is living a bad life, it is still wrong to murder them because a) you may not have judged their present and future quality of life and the effects of their death on others correctly and b) if people could just murder each other whenever they wanted to society would fall apart and we'd all be living bad lives. This means that in certain restricted, codified, high-knowledge situations it is OK or even good to kill somebody--all of them are controversial, but almost everyone accepts one kind or another. We move from pure to rule utilitarianism. Even if a murder appears to have positive utility, if we couldn't prove that to society in a way that it could categorize as acceptable, the murder is wrong.
But what about unborn or unconceived people? The first thing to say is that both groups are in the same situation: they aren't yet sentient members of society, so they have no rights. The social argument against murder doesn't work in their favor. But we still have to consider their future happiness, in the same way that we have to consider our own future happiness. And since they're in the same situation as each other, we shouldn't just be thinking about the ethics of abortion: if abortion is inherently immoral, then so is any way of decreasing the number of one's children, including abstinence from sex while fertile.
But if everyone tried to maximize their number of children, they would not be living mostly good lives anymore: the world would become overcrowded and poor, women always would be pregnant, most human activities would suffer at the expense of child-rearing. Even if the average life remained worth living, the total population would rise only a small amount before being limited by resource competition, that is, many people would either starve or die in war. The increase in population would not be great enough to justify the large decrease in quality of life. This means that in rule-utilitarian terms, abstinence is acceptable, and therefore abortion and contraception are too. But are they, in fact, mandatory? No, because a world without children would be worse than ours: if each generation is mostly happy under the current system, then having (let's hope) tens of thousands more generations would be better than having zero more. Therefore, the decision to bear children should be decided not by a general rule, but a on a case-by-case basis or by several more specific rules.
What reason could justify not having a child in this system, though? Well, for one thing, if our lives are net-positive it's not by very much: it's quite possible that having a child would be worse for you than it would be good for the child (especially since you would probably then be a worse parent). It's also possible that you have reason to think your child in particular would not be happy, or that your time and effort could go to better use elsewhere. Or if you would be a better parent when you are older, you would have good reason to wait.
I'm not perfectly convinced of either utilitarianism or several of the premises of this argument, but I do find it fairly strong and I hope it gives some kind of insight into what people with that set of opinions might be thinking. Though of course most people just haven't thought about it much.
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As for feeling grateful to your parents, I think that as a piece of rhetoric it is mostly just used to illustrate the idea that most lives are good, or at least that you expect your hypothetical child to be happy because you are. It doesn't work as an argument on its own. But I do think it makes sense as an emotion. If you can be grateful for them raising you, why not also for taking the necessary steps to do so?
But if I understand you correctly, the nub of the issue is that some people, like me, see nonexistence as equivalent (in moral or hedonistic terms--not in all ways) to a state of neutrality, without pleasure and joy or pain and sadness, while to you and many others nonexistence seems incommensurate with any state of experience--it's not on the scale. I'm not sure how to make an argument for my position. It just seems obvious to me. But I'll try. Apologies if this seems like a painfully basic argument that misses the point: Axiomatically, existence doesn't have value in itself, either positive or negative. Therefore, nonexistence can't have value either, since it should have the negative value of existence. Axiomatically, happiness has positive value and misery has negative value. Since in ethics we are asking "How much value does this have?", "nonexistence" is always interchangeable with "existence without happiness or misery" in ethical contexts.
Thank you for arguing in such detail, you make some good points
I don't agree with everything but I can't always explain in which way.
About the last point, I'm not sure I feel grateful for my parents raising me, as a whole
I do feel grateful for specific good parts and resentful for specific bad parts, but I don't think I have any feelings about the whole thing because I tend to see it as deterministic
It's kind of the same with conception I guess
I do make a difference between pro-natal and natal-neutral positions, and I'm much more sympathetic to the latter
I also understand wanting to place non-existence on the "good life / bad life" scale. As I said, I'm not sure how to quantify these things, but I don't really think it matters, as long as if you place it on the scale, you place it in a neutral or unfavorable position
My argument for the unfavorable position relative to the neutral position would be linked to preference utilitarianism I think:
The most important thing about bringing an important, neutral-expectation experience to someone is consent
You can't get consent from your kids before they're born
In a mostly cognitive way, because it would have happened a long time ago and I wouldn't feel directly impacted (although in a causal, physical sense, I would be)
But I don't think I would be more thankful than if another city of equal value to my eyes had been saved from horrible pain (also counting the pain of all the people who lost living loved ones)
Having a kid is one of the most radical, beautiful, and profound acts of hope that anyone can possibly do, and I encourage anyone reading this who wants to have kids to do it.
I definitely agree with the general thrust of your argument, that the damage caused by climate change is not going to be so terrible that you shouldn't have children, but I would quibble the point about climate change being unlikely to affect peoples lives in the west.
Climate migration, and food and water insecurity, both have potential as destabilising political forces. Add into this the political dysfunction in the US, and you could get into a situation where these problems, which are solvable to be sure, don't get dealt with in an effective way. I think that could lead to many kinds of disruption in peoples day to day lives, and I don't think that that's a scenario that is totally unrealistic.
We spend a lot more energy on heating than on cooling, in most temperate areas. So at least the biggest meteorological consequence shouldn't be hard to deal with, and it should make things easier from an energy standpoint.
I don’t think he’s saying that it’s unlikely to affect our lives in the west. But I think his point is that most of us would be happier to live our current lives with an extra (hurricane/tornado/wildfire) making us evacuate for one week every year rather than living a 1960s lifestyle, and our children and children’s children will likely be happier with their future economic situation combined with environmental disasters than we are with our current economic situation. They will be negatively effected by climate change, but not so much that their lives will be worse than ours, let alone not worth living.
"But tens of thousands of deaths and trillions of dollars lost is completely compatible with the average person in the First World not really noticing much of a change to their daily lives. The next 75 years of global warming are going to be worse than we’ve gotten already, maybe millions of lives lost and tens of trillions of dollars in damage. In aggregate, they’re going to be a giant disaster. But the average person in the First World, probably including your child, still won’t notice much of a change to their daily lives."
This is the point that I'm disagreeing with. I think there are a large number of climate related/exacerbated scenarios, which would lead to a noticeable change to the daily lives of many people in the west.
Climate change already affects my life even in one of the less-affected parts of the country. Weather patterns have changed enough to impact crops and make summer both frequently miserable and incredibly long.
As a daily, surfer, it may have made the water a bit more comfortable (though this year has been chilly), and if we ever do get more storms, it will probably generate some great waves. I guess it is all relative.
Not having children because of climate change hysteria just means the Earth gets inherited by people less susceptible to such maladaptive mind viruses, i.e. it is self-defeating at the most fundamental level.
Furthermore, what makes this extra ironic is that it is actually quite likely that global warming will *increases* the world's carrying capacity, not diminish it. In paleoclimatology, times of dearth, desertification, civilizational collapse, etc. were accompanied by cold spells, which create droughts. Conversely, a warmer planet is a wetter planet and a more fertile one as well, thanks to a more intensive fertilization effect. The Sahara was an edenic garden populated by rhinos and elephants when the world was 1-2C warmer. The opening up of Canada and Siberia to intensive agriculture, as well as more surprising areas like African highlands, will overwhelmingly make up for any marginal losses elsewhere.
As Scott Alexander alludes here, the impact of sea level rise is massively overstated. I will also add one more thing that might be a surprise to some: Most of the world's big coastal cities are *sinking* at a much faster rate due to the weight of all their buildings than due to sea level rise. And besides, no, 1% of SF and 10% of Manhattan will not disappear even if sea levels rise by three meters. Reminder that a third of the Netherlands is below sea level, with the deepest point being around 6 meters. They accomplished most of this during the pre-industrial era. You really believe a modern civilization (let alone a futuristic one) will have *any* problems whatsoever protecting its largest concentrations of GDP from water?
In reality, we should not be "fighting" global warming, but happily going along with it and perhaps even accelerating it.
Some examples of this from "Deep Future" by Curt Stager (professional climatologist, i.e. not a kook):
"Much of lowland Tokyo sank 6 to 13 feet (2 to 4 m) during the last century as a result of groundwater extraction; subsidence rates near the harbor can exceed 4 inches (10 cm) per year. Similar processes drive the soft ground beneath Bangkok, Thailand, downward as fast as 4.5 inches (12 cm) per year; that’s over twice the speed of Hansen’s extreme inundation estimate and forty times the recent rate of sea-level rise. And every year China’s largest city, Shanghai, sinks a third of an inch (10 mm) deeper into the Yangtze Delta. During the last century it dropped nearly 9 feet (3 m) and suffered billions of dollars in structural and flood damage.
These examples help to show what the future advance of the sea will really be like in most cases; slow, unrelenting, costly, exasperating, but rarely deadly to humans. It won’t be a frothing shoreward rush of waves, but it will still be well worth slowing down as much as possible, as residents of Shanghai and the other already-sinking cities would surely agree."
Stretched out as it is over many centuries, I consider this to be close to a non-issue.
Some parts of the world are actually rising. Scandinavia for example, up to 0,8 cm per year in some places. Due to the hundreds of meters of ice that pressed down the land during the last glacial maximum, as late as 20.000 years ago.
I don't think it is mainly the effect of the weight of the buildings. Some of it is geological, New Orleans is below sea level, I believe, because draining it to reduce yellow fever resulted in compression of the soil. Also, the Army Corps of Engineers has devoted a great deal of effort to keeping the Mississippi from changing its mouth as the delta builds out, so it is now dumping the soil it carries over the edge of the continental shelf, not letting it wash back to balance subsidence from the weight of past deposition (my memory of my geologist wife's account, but she is traveling at the moment so I can't check details with her — we lived in New Orleans for a while).
I was irritated years ago at an alarmist publication with a cover picture of flooding in a coastal area of the south, with no explanation that subsidence there was about twice as large as sea level rise.
The running joke in here New Orleans involves the 50% leak rate for the Sewer and Water Board. Without those leaking pipes, subsidence would be worse. Joking aside though, along with the sinking and subsidence of NOLA and LA gulf coast, coastal erosion & the channelization of the Mississippi are big contributors.
> Not having children because of climate change hysteria just means the Earth gets inherited by people less susceptible to such maladaptive mind viruses, i.e. it is self-defeating at the most fundamental level.
Even if you're going to be mercenary about this, my guess is that these are people whose genes you generally want in the next generation.
> Furthermore, what makes this extra ironic is that it is actually quite likely that global warming will *increases* the world's carrying capacity, not diminish it. In paleoclimatology, times of dearth, desertification, civilizational collapse, etc. were accompanied by cold spells, which create droughts. Conversely, a warmer planet is a wetter planet and a more fertile one as well, thanks to a more intensive fertilization effect. The Sahara was an edenic garden populated by rhinos and elephants when the world was 1-2C warmer. The opening up of Canada and Siberia to intensive agriculture, as well as more surprising areas like African highlands, will overwhelmingly make up for any marginal losses elsewhere.
I think it's plausible that millions of people will die because some megacity in Africa can no longer get water effectively. In the abstract, the earth's carrying capacity could very well go up, but unless you want to transport the city of Lagos to Quebec (I don't know whether the logistical or political problems would be harder!) we can't actually make use of that increased capacity to prevent millions of people from dying.
They're higher IQ and probably more conscientious and trusting of authority than average, so yes, that's probably true. I didn't say this would necessarily be good for society.
Oceanic transport is really, really cheap. Lagos is a coastal megapolis, and the Chinese are helpfully crisscrossing Africa with railways and expanding ports. I'm highly skeptical about "millions of people" dying. When *did* millions of people die of climatic causes in Africa? One prominent example would be the Ethiopian famine of the 1980s. Which in turn was thought to have been caused by "global dimming" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_dimming , i.e. a diminution of solar intensity and heating at the tropics, which reduced the strength of the monsoon that fed Ethiopians. Yet another demonstration of the pattern that it's generally cooling that kills, not warming.
I wandered into a lecture as an undergrad about "sustainable food supply" and was interested to discover that the biggest issue for many nations in getting food to their citizens is less in the production of enough food to feed everyone, and more in the political structures that prevent appropriate distribution of food that has already been produced. Indeed, even charities that try to give food to people often run into the problem of corrupt local government seizing food that would otherwise be sufficient to end a famine. Why keep people from starving when you can take the food, export it for cash, and keep the crisis going?
This actually works for more than just food. Iron supplementation can save lots of lives in Africa, yet getting those simple, cheap iron supplements to the people who need them is often frustrated by corrupt local government. This doesn't even run into refrigeration issues for things like vaccines. It's a cheap, plentiful solution that's widely available (and provided for free by charitable organizations), and yet hundreds of thousands still die of it.
At a slight tangent, people talk as if water shortage means people dying of thirst. When I calculated the figure for the U.S. quite a long time ago, per capita water consumption was about a thousand gallons a day. That isn't drinking water, it's agricultural and industrial uses. You made the point long ago on SSC that all urban water consumption in California was less than what went to grow alfalfa.
A few years ago I saw data showing that only about 10% of CA water usage was residential, and about half of that was landscaping. The exhortations to use less household water (take shorter showers, etc.) are usually ridiculous in light of the scale of agricultural and industrial waste.
The water economist David Zetland has for decades been promoting proper water pricing as the solution to the vast majority of water shortages. Most water systems are run by governments, which have an incentive to under-price water to all customers. How often are politicians re-elected on platforms based on, "I'll charge more for water!"? Because of the incentives facing governments, this obvious public choice problem exists around the world, resulting in under-priced water leading to over use and aquifer depletion.
Of course, many misguided advocates for the poor also advocate for low water prices, which often tend to benefit the wealthy rather than the poor,
"I conclude this section by reminding readers that low water prices, by encouraging use, often harm the poor who are least able to cope with the resulting scarcity and shortage. In New Delhi, for example, around 40 percent of water is lost to leaks and theft and revenue covers only 40 percent of costs.12 The resulting lack of funds to run or expand the system (and water to flow though it) means the poor are more likely to get their water from tankers than the rich who are connected to the semi-functional, cheaper network (Vinayak and Sewak, 2016). Fuente et al. (2016), likewise, describe show subsidies in Nairobi are more likely to go to the rich than the poor. "
Zetland's solution is basically to price water appropriately and then provide rebates to the poor.
For an overview of the global pathologies of water pricing and how water should be priced, see Zetland's "The Role of Prices in Managing Water Scarcity," from which the paragraph above was taken, see
Of course all of this is obvious to most economists, and yet mainstream debate on water, at least in mass media, seems oblivious to common sense economics on this issue (as on most issues). What percentage of media coverage of current or future water shortages even mentions pricing as a solution? I'd say well under 1%.
Yes, but I do think we also need water for irrigation if we are to not have water shortage causing crop failure. And besides, the US has already been irrigating unsustainably -- draining 10,000 year aquifers -- for over a century...
We need to irrigate in some places, but not everywhere. In California, agriculture produces <2% of the GDP, and employs a few % of the population. It could stop doing agriculture altogether, and import all its food from wetter places.
On the other hand, one effect of CO2 fertilization is to reduce water requirements for plants. They can get the carbon they need while passing less air through the leaves, thus lose less water.
A priori a factor of 2, right? You need half the air to get the same amount of CO2, so half the water otherwise lost gets lost. But I thought a major purpose of transpiration at least in taller plants was to provide the motive force to haul water up from the soil, since (contra elementary school science class) capillary action is wholly inadequate. So I can't really see a redwood needing significantly less water. But maybe for grasses and crops?
I don't have data, but C3 plants (all important crops except maize and sugarcane) increase yield by about 30% with a doubling of CO2. If we assume the amount of CO2 they need is proportional to yield, which seems a plausible guess, they should need 1.3/2 =.65 as much water.
I want to push back on this framing of the movement of a megacity in Lagos to Quebec. I see this a lot in climate debates, and I don't think people who use it understand how much it biases the skeptics against their arguments. Because that's not how this kind of thing works in real life.
A megacity in Lagos doesn't run out of water overnight and have to suddenly move to Quebec. Experts project these things to happen over 1-2 centuries. In that time, many generations come and go. Nobody has to actually relocate their family to depopulate Lagos. The next generation can see 50% of the children relocate to other cities and establish themselves there. They'll still come back to visit, but there's just more opportunity elsewhere. A city that shrinks in population by 50% every 25 years will have <1% its original population 200 years later. And nobody had to approve a government mega-project to do it.
This is literally happening to dying towns in Pennsylvania and other parts of what used to be called "steel country" in the US. When steel went to Japan in the 1970's and 1980's lots of small towns that produced coal to feed the steel mills in Pittsburgh, Allentown, and the like no longer had jobs available for the next generation. People still live in many of those small towns, but the populations are getting older as many from the upcoming generation find opportunity elsewhere. I've seen this firsthand.
That's not to discount major shifts in global population. But if you want to support an argument like the Laotian megacity disastrophe, you have to do it based on threshold effects. Not based on slow-clock, gradual resource depletion.
I strongly disagree. The increased carrying capacity, and higher average global income (estimated by the IPCC to be between 500 and 600% higher than today by centuries end), and improved technology (transportation, desalination, market networks, etc) will make it easier to transport water to this mythical city. Modern people don’t move to water, they bring water to them wherever they go.
I think the likelihood of millions dying from thirst due to climate change is extremely remote. I would suggest that overreactions to climate change could disrupt societies and markets enough to kill millions, though.
My framing of the issue is that society is complex and fragile. Climate change is a negative externality or wake generated by economic growth. Billions of people are counting on that economic growth to improve the lives of themselves and their children. It is very desirable that we continue economic and technological advancement while also minimizing this and other negative externalities. However, in no case should we kill the goose laying the golden eggs. And it is possible to kill this goose by taking misguided actions to reduce CO2. Derailing the economic growth of Africa COULD kill millions.
This is like a longer version of 'The climate has always changed' argument for doing little to nothing about the broader negative impacts on the environment caused by rapid, unchecked industrialization.
It's been theorized that the beginning of intensive rice cultivation in East Asia pushed back the onset of the next Ice Age. If so, that worked out splendidly. Otherwise, we wouldn't be discussing this, but exchanging stories about the mythical Summertime over a campfire.
The climate "skeptics" are no less susceptible to "maladaptive mind viruses". Like for example the one that says climate change isn't a thing to be skeptical about, but a certain hoax.
If we're going to have maladaptive mind viruses, we can at least not have them be a monoculture.
Could you identify where I expressed climate skepticism? Let alone claimed it was a hoax?
I happen to have a blog post from 2009 debunking AGW myths. http://akarlin.com/2009/06/global-warming-denial-myths/ The reality of AGW was always obvious to me. Conversely, the stance that AGW's effects *have to be* predominantly negative *are* a religion, much like climate change denial come to think of it (people are incredibly hostile to the notion that AGW might be neutral or even good, as demonstrated even by the otherwise rationalist Scott in his response to me with the bizarre scenario of Lagos running out of water).
Happily I snapped out of that apocalypse cult several years ago. A non cherry-picked reading of the paleoclimate literature demonstrates that the effects will be mixed at worst, and on the very low probability this is wrong, geoengineering is trivially cheap relative to carbon taxes and other Green projects (which hit the poor hardest).
And of course, Lomborg and the Copenhagen consensus also ranked global priorities and climate change didn’t score very high at least in terms of cost and benefit. IOW, not only is there virtually no existential risk, but in terms of cost effectiveness, global warming shouldn’t even be that high on our list of pressing issues. Perhaps there are better reasons to not have kids?
As a kid I remember reading A Choice of Catastrophes by Asimov, which ran through all the possible ways that the world could end, starting with catastrophes that would destroy the entire universe (Big Crunch, heat death), continuing on to catastrophes that could destroy the solar system, then catastrophes that would just destroy the Earth, and finally catastrophes that would leave the Earth in place but just make it uninhabitable. It's from 1979 so it's no longer quite up to date (the Big Crunch is looking very unlikely these days), but a good read nonetheless.
I had 2 kids already for reasons having nothing to do with this argument. So I am biased.
Unfortunately my gut feeling is, if you pit this argument against Moloch, Moloch wins. Politicians have done nothing to keep us from getting to this point wrt global warming. I think the ones who are electable have gotten that way because they're mostly corrupt as hell. Whatever their party, if they even accept global warming their "solutions" will inevitably enrich their political allies and not actually solve any problems. If only one party believes global warming is a threat, this actually makes things worse, since that party will continue to be elected if people believe the problem is getting worse, but then not actually fix the problem.
Fixing global warming would also require global cooperation, and my understanding at present is most of the world doesn't really care since they're more focused on improving standards of living.
Sloppy arguments, possibly, but these are my hunches as to why global warming will play out in full no matter what we do. I make myself feel better by reading Paul Wheaton's stuff and fantasizing about getting into permaculture on a larger scale one day.
I agree. My son is a beautiful, kind, generous boy and I love him dearly. I hope I am wrong about the world he will inherit because I believe the foundations of our civilization are much more fragile than Scott does.
Climate alarmism is based on a morality tale where the ignorant masses are accepting a Faustian bargain with the devil that only the alarmist and their friends are smart enough to understand. When you look at the actual costs of climate change and see these maps where you really have to squint to see any difference, hurricanes going from six per year to seven per year, and supposed civil wars in the middle east you're pretty sure are caused by political and religious ideology, you start to really doubt whether #costs of climate change > #costs of action to prevent climate change. You have a hard time understanding how anyone could be close to certain the costs of the former exceed the costs of the latter and think it's more likely that they are being driven by an emotionally compelling story that lets them feel superior to and control the behavior of others.
On a brighter note, perhaps we don’t need global coordinated political cooperation. For example, if some bright scientists can figure out how to remove CO2 at an affordable cost, or we can crack the code on fusion, or make a breakthrough in solar or geothermal. Any one of these or various other ideas (which myriads of bright people are working on as we speak) would not just solve the negative externality of climate change, but also further improve standards of living.
The relevance being that population levels are subject to control systems, and so any policy argument premised on an individual action's impact must account for a strong form of "if I didn't, someone else would".
"We demonstrate that the Faithfulness property that is assumed in much causal analysis is robustly violated for a large class of systems of a type that occurs throughout the life and social sciences: control systems. These systems exhibit correlations indistinguishable from zero between variables that are strongly causally connected, and can show very high correlations between variables that have no direct causal connection, only a connection via causal links between uncorrelated variables. Their patterns of correlation are robust, in that they remain unchanged when their parameters are varied. The violation of Faithfulness is fundamental to what a control system does: hold some variable constant despite the disturbing influences on it. No method of causal analysis that requires Faithfulness is applicable to such systems."
Although I agree we can't justify anti-natalism as a policy on the effects of climate change, I think we can on the grounds of factory farming. That's because right now there are several farmed animals living in misery for every human in a developed nation.
But again, anyone who believes can just raise their child vegan and donate to an organisation like The Humane League. You'd think someone like that would, in expectation, raise a child who has a positive impact on non-human animal lives.
Those people aren’t the target of this argument, because those people aren’t considering global scale arguments for and against.
But also, if you asked those people whether they thought their kid would be a net positive or negative for the world, the vast majority would think the kid is a net positive. (I think the same is true if you ask them about the kid of a random couple who lives down the street, so that you can control for the fact that people vastly overestimate their own kids.)
> well-off, educated Americans are in the top 1% of people today in terms of how good their children’s lives are likely to be, and probably in the top 0.01% throughout history.
Since the total number of people who have ever lived is estimated to be around 125 billion, saying that well-off, educated Americans (say the top 15 million) rank in the top 12.5 million of people who have ever lived isn't completely accurate, but adjust it slightly to 0.05% of everyone who has ever lived and you're definitely there.
It’s a larger scope, but I’d love a post from you about the antinatalism debate in general, more than just “I am grateful for my parents’ decisions here.” I don’t know how to meaningfully say that an experience can be “better” or “worse” than nonexistence, let alone decide whether a particular existence (e.g. my putative child’s) meets that bar. A lot of philosophy depends on the question of if/when life is worth living (e.g. population ethics/the repugnant conclusion), so it’s awkward for me to be undecided on the question.
Note to other commenters: this is just a suggestion of a post topic for Scott; I don’t receive notifications of comment replies so I will not see your arguments.
1) To add to the $30k offset point: If you're someone who lives a low-carbon lifestyle and for whom tackling climate change is very important, even aside from growing up to be a climate scientists or whatnot, *your kid will use less carbon than average*. They'll get cycled around, fly less, live in a well-insulated house with solar panels, have a vegetarian diet, etc etc.
2) I've seen a few arguments below that "people who say they are not having children for climate change are liars / self-deluded and are just rationalising a separate desire". This is a pretty unproductive statement. It's both broadly unprovable and belittling to the people involved, and presents no counter-argument. What is the purpose of making this argument?
Disclaimer: I am having children, and the climate/population impact was one of many considerations in my decision which I decided was OK based off of similar arguments to the post above.
Oh, this is about me. So, I agree that "people who say they are not having children for climate change are just rationalising a separate desire" is hard to prove, but I do not see that as bellitling.
You see an awful lot of emotionally charged moral rhetoric from pro-natalists (e.g. in this thread), so I find it very understandable that people who are not comfortable with having children have resorted to a sort of its mirror image.
One purpose of such a statement is to suggest that focusing on climate change would be very ineffective at addressing fertility. And it probably is proveable if we were interested in doing longer term attitudinal studies.
When I see lists that have "ways to reduce carbon emissions" which include "not having kids", I always wonder why they don't also include "suicide". Wouldn't that also by very, very similar logic be even more effective? After all, I'd guess a good portion of parents would literally sacrifice their lives for their children (and figuratively very often do so). Why is only one of those ideas considered appalling?
Well, if you think that hypothetical children-to-be-born should be considered equivalent to born children (or adult) lives, the carbon footprint of a child will be the least of your philosophic and moral problems...
Putting aside the topic of climate change, I'm always somewhat fascinated by how little people realize just how drastically population dynamics have changed in the past 10-20 years.
We literally are in Peak Child right now - we'll never have more kids alive then when you are reading this sentence - and population will peak in the next 30 years or so, fall slowly for a couple decades then really pick up speed. The only things that could deter this would be 1) a new baby boom or 2) huge increases in longevity.
The former seems to me to be extremely unlikely - outside of Africa, there are no countries with a fertility rate above replacement and within africa it's declining more or less universally - and the latter is just kicking the can down the road.
I remember the "Peak" start stated with "Peak Oil", which was forgotten after fracking expanded oil supplies. John Landgraf of FX started using the phrase "Peak TV" years ago when there was a lot less TV than there is now. I doubt you're right about "Peak Child" if we look long enough into the future.
Demographics is a weird science in that you can't find more people like you can in other areas (e.g. oil). People aren't hiding under rocks somewhere, and the only direction it can really go is down due to disease, war and similar events.
Disease and war have been around for quite a while, during most of which time population has been trending up, not down. If it goes down in some countries in the next few decades the reason will be, not disease and war, but people choosing not to have children.
I meant: Disease and war not accounted for by current modeling. In theory it could get better. But the downside to population under, say, World War III or even another significant war wipes out people in a way that no campaign to urge population growth has ever worked historically.
China is learning this to their grief right now: Lowering the TFR was easy. Getting people to repopulate into a society that is no longer multi-child centric is just trying to unring a bell that can't be unrung.
Where is your source indicating the "then really pick up speed?" I thought the prognosis was that once developing countries reach "peak urbanisation" along with minimally established education, all cultures will lower fertility rates below replacement levels.
I presume he means that population *decline* will really pick up speed, though I suspect if it got to that we'd see heavy pro-natalist policies being implemented.
Am I misunderstanding you or are we in violent agreement? TFR will continue to plummet, and as society greys in terms of average age, the world population decline will accelerate.
Africa however will almost certainly grow unless there is a dramatic shift in TFR in the next 50 years. It won't be quite as large as Asia most likely but it will be very, very close.
I misunderstood you. I think Africa will reach peak faster because it will be last area to be invested in which means for all foreign investors who want to maximize their return, only Africa will be the large field to do so.
There were some studies on what it would actually take to destroy human civilisation (which is what I imagine when I hear 'humanity is doomed'). Can't find the source but it's something like - we burn all the remaining fossil fuel reserves, shoot the temperature up by 12 degrees in a few decades and kick the climate into a venus-like hothouse equilibrium, and then forget to move the survivors to Antarctica over the decades we have.
What's the most realistic and charitable reading of 'doomed' and the most plausible route to it, that I can imagine? If you take everything in this very doomery 80k hours podcast (https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/mark-lynas-climate-change-nuclear-energy/) as a given (despite all the good criticisms Robert Wiblin offers) you might just get 10% population loss from a super-duper ultra cascade famine that very suddenly knocks global food production down 20% in a couple of years (which we've somehow not prepared for in any way). This would look more like worse than Spanish flu better than Black Death type situation, would be an unimaginably bad disaster, but this itself is the unlikely tail risk to worry about.
And the Black Death didn't destroy civilisation or even destabilize a single region of the world!
And I'm just guessing here, but in a certain sense this 56% of young people are even wronger than e.g. creationists or Qanon believers because Qanon believers don't falsely believe most domain experts agree with them, and I bet most of that 56% think 'doomed' is what the scientific consensus is.
What's worse is the bbc article all about avoiding climate anxiety doesn't say (Again being extremely charitable to climate doomers) 'Oh btw remember that outcomes where many hundreds of millions of people die in a short timespan are highly unlikely and require multiple independent things to go wrong at once'.
I really have trouble understanding how the consensus can be this wrong about something that could be trivially easily checked by just asking the scientists involved.
I think a lot of people are using "humanity is doomed" very, very loosely, in a way that would include a Black Death or even WWII-sized amount of destruction and disruption.
I earlier gave the Mencken quote about imaginary hobgoblins. He views their creation as the aim of "practical politics," but I think it is something broader. The media have an incentive that has nothing to do with politics — doom is a good story that sells papers. Beyond that, there is some reason why people enjoy imagining doom, civilizational collapse, and the like.
Reminds me of the internet comments when Pinker posted some articles on his research on the recent progressive trends on most measurable dimensions. Some people are really inflamed by the idea that the world isn’t doomed. Suggesting that the world has been getting better in some ways
really bothers some people.
There seemed to be a trend in the 19th and early 20th C to be an irrational optimist feeding the gods of progress. Now we see more people lean the opposite way. If I was a psychologist, I would love to do a study of what is making these folks tick.
I read "Doomed" as: I think things will get worse until something really bad happens, before getting better.
Thus, the hopelessness.
It's in the US as well. All these Zoomers grew up in a society where compassion and collectivism were totally secondary in prestige to individualism and STACKING FAT CASH, and are reacting logically to their environment IMO.
I guess it's because scientists themselves talk in terms of "the consequences will be catastrophic". Except by "catastrophic", the scientists mean something like "many of the species we like to study will go extinct", and ordinary people interpret it as "we're all gonna die".
Guilty as charged, haha. I can't tell you how many impassioned discussions about molluscs and ocean acidification I've been party to over the past decade. (Though the human impact is not zero, either.)
My personal interpretation of "humanity is doomed" is the end of the post WW2 progress in individual liberties and average standard of living, especially in western democracies (i believe they are linked, and also a necessary condition for actual democracies). And I do not see this doom happening in the future, I think we are in it, since the nineties probably. No mass starvation or climatic apocalypse or serious plague or anything worth of a catastrophe movie...more the triumph of the china societal model, but minus their emergence of a middle class and fast SoL increase (that may be halted anyway)
I think we should go back a step farther and question the premise: that you not having children today has ANY impact on the future world population. That premise is entirely unfounded. I don't understand why it isn't questioned more.
If I went to NYC and sterilized 50% of the rats, how do you think that would impact the rat population of the city 3-4 years from now? I predict it would have no impact at all. (Assuming a rat lifespan ~2 years.) That's because the rat population of NYC isn't based on the reproduction rate of rats. Neither is the population of the Earth. Both have potential reproduction rates that far exceed their actual rates.
If human population levels were determined by reproduction rate, we wouldn't have seen stable populations for thousands of years, and then sudden exponential growth when crop yields improved dramatically these past few centuries. Individual decisions don't matter, because they're not part of an isolated system. Only systemic decisions matter.
Say you were planning to have a child and send them to Yale. Scott says they could become a future climate engineer and discover new ways of capturing carbon. Instead, someone who was going to go to a State school ends up at Yale and discovers the next generation of fracking technology. But why stop there? There's a slot open at the State school, after all. That gets filled by someone who ends up as a project manager, but who otherwise would have been an electrician. The electrician is replaced by someone who would have done drywall. Now we need another drywaller, who comes across the Southern border from any one of a number of nations we in the US collectively refer to as "Mexico", to the chagrin of culturally diverse heritages. We trace your decision all the way back to some tenement in Guatemala, El Salvador, or maybe Nigeria. The specific pathway doesn't matter. What matters is that someone else decides to have one more child because you decided to have one fewer.
This should be intuitive, but I don't understand why it isn't. The birth rate in the US has been well below replacement rate for generations now, yet the population continues to grow along with the global population. That's because the US imports that population growth, as we have for nearly all of our history (even before the birthrate dropped below replacement). Your decision not to have children is a decision to let someone else raise the next generation. Nothing more.
The rat population would be the same 3 years from now because it hits carrying capacity.
We're not at Earth's carrying capacity (given technology), so reproducing more should increase population until we reach it, which will be after whatever global warming stuff is going to happen happens.
I agree colleges are at carrying capacity, but that's not the same argument.
I agree most US growth is through immigration, but number one, I don't think immigration officials look at current growth before deciding how many immigrants to take, and number two, even if they take fewer immigrants because of your kid, that potential immigrant still exists in their own country.
It's true that we're not technically at the carrying capacity of the Earth, but that capacity isn't a static number. It changes with new technologies - including political innovations. If you're the Ukraine in the 1930's, despite being one of the most fertile places on the planet, your 'carrying capacity' is millions of people fewer than your population. Yet gradual improvements across the globe - whether of technological innovation, political improvements, or just plain improved ability to move somewhere better - have resulted in cumulative increases in global carrying capacity over the past few centuries.
[Not to be confused with "a world we would like to live in", we could conceivably continue to increase carrying capacity for many more billions of people. (Though obviously not infinitely, since the Earth is a finite system.) Back in Malthus's day that appeared to be less than a billion people. And indeed, if they'd had today's population there would have been mass starvation and death. If we continue to improve agriculture, we can assume population levels will continue to increase as they have in the past. And if those don't improve, population will not.]
Let's call US immigration policy an emergent phenomenon as opposed to looking at it as a set policy. When the economy isn't doing well, not as many people come here (legally or otherwise) and when it's doing great more people come here, regardless of what the official policy is.
Maybe an argument against having more children is that your child will increase the carrying capacity of the US (and by extension the planet)? Perhaps 1st worlders having more children will have a multiplier effect on economic growth that will allow other people to have more children as well? Maybe more so if your child goes into agriculture research, or improves global sustainable supply distribution mechanisms.
I'm not sure I like the implications of that argument, though. It seems to imply that certain types of altruism - those that relieve suffering and promote human flourishing - are net-negative for humanity; that we should be looking to make third-world people suffer and not want to have children, that we should build 'big beautiful walls' around national borders to keep economic gains from going to those most likely to use them to support a higher birthrate, and at the extreme that refugees should be abandoned to their fate. Maybe there's another way to push the economic incentives toward lower population - one that doesn't involve starvation - but it seems to point in the opposite direction to economic growth.
Perhaps the more straightforward answer is a political one, but that's still not simple. You could impose a global population growth rate limit, but that kind of requires either a one-world government, or strict immigration laws of the kind that would make Trump blush. (E.g. no immigration from a nation with a birthrate higher than yours, legal or otherwise.)
Different people appear to make their reproductive decisions based on different limiting factors. For some it may be out of concern for the future, for some food availability, for some their prospects for a better life in their country or their ability to move to a different country. I'm saying the marginal decision at a population level to increase the global population by 1 is not directly tied to an individual's decision to have a child. Basic biology should make this point obvious, yet somehow there's a collective assumption that it applies to every other species than humans. Humans don't escape basic biology when they improve carrying capacity. They can influence the factors involved, sure, but that's different than dismissing basic biology because 'humans are different'.
To be clear, I'm not claiming you or anyone else is explicitly doing this. But it seems an implicit assumption to look at continuous incremental increases in population and blame individual choices more than continuous incremental improvements in technologies to feed, clothe, and house people. That's what drove population increase in the past. We haven't done anything fundamentally to change that dynamic, so why would we assume it is different now?
So you really want yourself, or your (hypothetical) children to live a carrying-capacity lifestyle ? That sounds pretty grim to me. Yes, I do agree that turning the Earth into Coruscant is inevitable in the long run, but deliberately speeding up that process sounds counterproductive.
Good point. If the argument is, "you're accelerating toward carrying capacity by having more children who increase economic output" there's no reason to restrict this argument to your children. By this logic, if you're making a net-positive contribution to economic output you're improving carrying capacity. We could go further and say increases in the capital stock will likely cause enduring improvements in carrying capacity - especially research or intellectual contributions.
What should we do, then? Quit our jobs and try to live off the welfare system? Is that enough, or should we all just go online and make counterproductive comments that suck up productivity? Maybe if we're clever enough we could make people stupider for listening to us or get people to distrust scientific research. Death to progress!
My point was really a lot milder than your (admittedly sarcastic) take: when making decisions, we should not consider as our target the absolute limit of what the Earth can support; but rather, what it can support *comfortably*. To use an extreme example, humans can survive pretty much indefinitely in tiny sealed capsule apartments while eating ration bars -- after all, astronauts live pretty much like that, and they don't even have gravity -- but I don't want to build a world where such living conditions are the norm.
I agree. I guess I just don't see a path to a world where we're controlling resource utilization based on an agreed upon population limitation, as opposed to a current-carrying-capacity limitation. The norm right now is to just keep pushing capacity higher and higher.
The proposal for selective sub-populations to limit their reproduction in an effort to push against the larger biological reality has never seemed like a real solution to me. Seems more like a good way to selectively breed those sub-populations out of the gene pool, such that over time you'll encourage high-reproducing sub-populations to expand into the niches left behind by low-reproducers.
Either way, eventual population size isn't really determined by reproduction so much as by other factors. At most, replacing low-reproducers with high-reproducers would help human population levels bounce back after apocalyptic scenarios. But "post-apocalyptic resilience" isn't the stated purpose of these self-selective breeding campaigns. If it were, their popularity would likely suffer.
"do agree that turning the Earth into Coruscant is inevitable in the long run"
I don't. Since all first world countries are having problems keeping the birth rate *up*, I think it is is fairly inevitable within a few centuries that the world will have stabilised at a 2.1 birth rate.
This assumes that Yale transforms a young kid into a genius, instead of Yale having the sorting skills to find the child genius and get him admitted to their ranks and branded with Yale® to recruit future child geniuses.
Hmm, I found myself nodding along with the arguments and feeling smug that my desire to have children is validated. So, you know, alarm bells going off for me.
Uh, I can't remember what the next step is after you notice yourself feeling smug after reading something you agree with - can anyone remind me?
I do not think that global warming is central to the argument, any scenario where having a growing # of people on earth would make average life quality of people decrease would basically be the same regarding the morality of having more/less children. In fact, given how controversial global warming is (regarding severity and timescale for example), maybe using global warming will detract analysis of the fundamental issue.
So what are the arguments against having less kids if a growing population means decreased standard of living?
It seems it boils down to:
- the effect of one individual decision is negligeable because it's the global population increase (or, at "worst", regional population increase) that condition your children well being......welcome to the tragedy of the commons :-(
- group size influence it's political weigh and capacity to defend/promote it's prefered way of life, so not having children may improve your group well being w.r.t. global population, but this is always less than the loss of political influence of the group your child will likely belong.....welcome to natality warfare :-(
- on average a kid may be a net loss, but my kid will be better than average so he will be a net gain...errrrr...even if it is very likely true, can you say that in polite left-ish society?
Those arguments are not without merit (they really decrease the interest of having less kids if the well being of your kids is what you try to maximize)....but there are really machiavellian in nature (it's the traitor strategy in prisoner dilemna) and I am extremely surprised to see that from Scott....
Sorry, the last argument is in fact not a traitor strategy....but it's definitely non-egalitarian and probably the one that will get you ostracized the most in the current culture...
Population outside Africa is stable, and total population is going to stabilize within a few decades. It's currently controversial whether higher or lower populations are better for everyone else - higher means it's more crowded, but also that there are more people thinking up ideas and moving the economy along for everyone else. Keep in mind that most people now would prefer to be in the more populated (countries, cities, states) than the least populated ones.
For sure. I do not think demography is a reason to get panicky ATM (nor is global warming, even less so in fact....so people know where I stand)...But I am reasoning in the abstract, from a premise where on average, one more kid will decrease the standard of living of everybody (infinitely so, but decrease - BTW, in the 70s, when the population scare was all the rage, it did make sense to worry. I think it did far more sense to worry about it then that to worry about green house gases now).
This is the core of the argument (what's a negative effect of growing population on average well beeing should tell us about having (a lot? above replacement level? any?) children), and a very EA one...hence my surprise and my suspicion we may see a second post on this soon-ish :-)
There is absolutely a level of density where "we need to control and ideally stop population growth, now" becomes a common opinion. From experiences in my own country and elsewhere it seems to reach that point around 800/km2.
I did the computation:800 is really high.. II guess you are talking about small region or even city - state, because i all in a small country at half this density and it's already an anomaly that would not scale to a larger country...
I know it's high, but perhaps not as high as you might think, and in any case I think that the level at which such views become commonplace *should* be a lot lower.
I am from Belgium, the average in my country is 370p/km², but the northern region is smaller and more densily populated, 490p/km². 370 is already not confortable, but 490 is clearly too high: there is a housing issue in the north, like there is in the netherlands (419p/km²). So you can say that for a typical European way of life, 400 is the limit. Above that it's not like people will starve or die of epidemics, but they will not be able to live the life they could enjoy if the density was lower at an equivalent income. For an American way of life, I guess it's lower than that, probably 200.
Of course, translating that to a city instead of a country makes no sense: cities import food and people can travel outside very frequenctly if they want non-urban surrounding
"Population outside Africa is stable, and total population is going to stabilize within a few decades"
Population outside Africa is not IMO 'stable' and is unlikely to 'stabilise' at any point in the foreseeable future. Population sizes in some countries are temporarily at the cusp of an inverted parabola because collapsing birthrates have been offset by declining mortality. On a longer-term basis, populations are either going to collapse messily in most of the developed world, or wind up being rescued by longevity treatments (which will lead straight back to population growth.)
On even longer timescales there's likely to be both genetic and cultural selection for increased fertility, but a lot of things could happen on longer timescales and most predictions go out the window.
There is no good reason to believe that an increasing population leads to a decreasing standard of living. That was the core assumption of the population scare of the sixties, and its predictions were the opposite of what has actually happened since then.
That's, i think, the only way out from an EA point of view, you have to challenge the premise (the idea that life will be worse, on average, if you have more people on earth) . I said "i think" cause i am not really into EA, but i think our host is and this post is really untypical. BTW, i think that indeed, at this point of demography and technical possibilities, more people will result in decreased standard of living even accounting for progress, but that is perfectly debatable. It's the other arguments that seems incompatible with EA (but compatible with a more "selfish" (and more natural imho) philosophy where people care about the well being of themselves, their family and friends far more than strangers).
Just curious, what is does Holland risk with rising sea level? Are the such old hands at holding back the sea that they are in good shape even seas rise faster than projected?
The inverse of not having children (for the various reasons a couple chose not to) are the pro-natalists who think an endless supply of human progeny to prop up a system of extraction and destruction to maintain their status quo living standards as a 1st-Worlder are why we're in the situation we face. When we have an entire political party centered around the idea that conservation of resources and the environment are just virtue signaling and then enact policy or personal actions directly inverse to 'own the libs' is another reason why it's so difficult to make incremental changes. Not to mention the vested interests of industries whose entire business model is based upon maximal extraction and burning of fossil fuels regardless of the externalized negative impacts of doing so.
People have a myriad of reasons to have children and not have children. I question the rationale of couples who think they need more than two but I'm not going to propose passing policies to curtail that decision but I also don't think we need policies that encourage it either. The most common excuses I hear are "I came from a big family," "I love children," "blessed be the fruit of the womb," and the underlying narcissism that the world should be blessed with more than 2 of them (regardless of one's ability to afford more than 2.)
That aside, Scott's premise that more Democrats should have kids precisely because their kids need to counteract Republican breeding stock numbers because of climate change, might be appropriate if elections were structured around a popular vote but we don't have that. I live in Louisiana and even if I had 500 kids, it would have no impact on the overall conservative stranglehold on the State's legislation nor the stranglehold that the extraction industries have on the state for the foreseeable future. I suspect a very-left liberal in Austin couldn't breed fast enough to counteract the overt gerrymandering by the GOP to lock in conservative control for decades to come nor the cultural affinity for oil & gas that strangles Texas.
My concerns about climate change on my two kids are not future existential risks when they're 80yrs old. Moving hours or states away from my wife's extended family right now isn't an option. My concern is that the natural world I grew up with has drastically been altered and diminished over the last 40yrs that the impacts of climate change aren't in the future. My two young kids' 'normal' is an environment that is less wild. For a majority of Americans (regardless of political persuasion) this is not a big deal because they don't really care.
Educating my kids about the natural environment, giving them the tools and curiosity to not just simply observe but care for it in the limited ways we can is what I'm focusing on. Building in resiliency is another. But people are deluding themselves if they think the larger and more negative impacts of climate change are 80 years away before the collective 'we' have to act is why we keep kicking the can down the road.
Environmentalists, technologists, climatologists, scientists, and others concerned about the long-term effects of climate change on future humanity are driving them to accelerate solutions despite the complacency of status quo'ers. Do I think having a few kids will doom the world? No. Do I think not having kids will doom the world? No. I think it's the current crop of adults that will manage to do that nicely before we get around to doing the hard work necessary to accelerate carbon reductions and reversing stupid policy decisions that encourage waste and inefficiencies for profit.
The 1st-world has managed to stave off the catastrophic affects of severe drought and water shortages in parts of the Western U.S., but just like low-lying coastal areas, some populations will probably need to relocate sooner rather than later. Areas of the desert Southwest will have to shrink or stop existing because it will be unsustainable to do so without consistent water supplies. Agriculture & livestock production will have to be forced to rethink how it operates in areas where it doesn't make sense - like livestock crop farming and other water-heavy crops in West and Southwest.
I think it's rather unfair to assume or count on future generations to fix the problems they didn't create or will inherit when we know the causes and have the necessary technologies to fix now but are collectively too selfish to do so.
"we know the causes and have the necessary technologies to fix now but are collectively too selfish to do so"
More accurately, the cost of fixing it now would be greater than the cost of doing nothing
"I question the rationale of couples who think they need more than two"
How about, they want more than 2 and their kids will make the world a better place? Seems pretty easy to understand.
"an entire political party centered around the idea that conservation of resources and the environment are just virtue signaling and then enact policy or personal actions directly inverse to 'own the libs'"
Are you talking about Republicans here? You think the Republican party is centered around the idea that conservation is virtue signalling??
"I suspect a very-left liberal in Austin couldn't breed fast enough to counteract the overt gerrymandering by the GOP..."
Actually, I don't think the cost of fixing it now would be greater than the cost of doing nothing, unless you're relying on global depression to drive the future cost to zero. It's a question of whether or not you think 'costs' are strictly limited to just economic outputs.
I've never met a family that had more than 2 kids who gave the reason 'my brood of 5 kids will make the world a better place.' The usual response has been 'just because' which I find less convincing than the reasons a couple gives me for not having children.
The current Republican party has the stance that environmental conservation is performative virtue signaling. Are there outliers? Yes but the majority of officeholders seem to express that viewpoint.
Honestly, I think people having kids for political purposes is the worst reason to have them.
I've literally never heard anyone in politics say that environmental conservation is performative virtue signaling. Can you give me an example of what you are talking about?
The most prominent example is Dick Cheney's position that conservation is a sign of personal virture. The Bush Administration gutted funding for the Federal Energey Managment Program by 48% and since the Bush era the GOP position on any energy policy that incorporates or prioritizes renewables or efficiency/conservation doesn't exist.
If that's the only reason anyone should need to justify having children then we don't need to question the reasons or impune the motives for why people chose to not have children.
I think the choice to have kids or not have kids is also dependent upon the size family one grew up in. For example, I have friend that was an only child of two parents who were only children of parents who were only children. Conversely, I have one sibling and most of my cousins were 2-child households. All of us have had one/two kids. I married into a Catholic family. My wife's parents had 4 kids and she has 25 cousins who've all married and have at a minimum of 2 kids. The family Christmas is comprised of 60 people. It's overwhelming at times and other times very joyous.
But I'm happy w/ 2 kids and I don't think my wife and I could handle the stress of more. I mean, sure have 5 kids but 10?
"The inverse of not having children (for the various reasons a couple chose not to) are the pro-natalists who think an endless supply of human progeny to prop up a system of extraction and destruction to maintain their status quo living standards as a 1st-Worlder"
Guilty as charged, more or less. That world seems a happier one than the one where we reduce living standards by 10% to avert .1% of harm from climate change.
"The most common excuses I hear are "I came from a big family," "I love children," "blessed be the fruit of the womb," and the underlying narcissism that the world should be blessed with more than 2 of them (regardless of one's ability to afford more than 2.)"
What's wrong with the "excuse" of "I love children?" Would you say "I'm having gay sex because I enjoy having gay sex" is an "irrational excuse?" As to "narcissism," you seem to think the world would be a better place if people were more similar to yourself at least as far as policy preferences go. So it seems that it's the method, not the end goal, that you have a problem with. As to the problem of people having kids they can't afford and burdening the rest of society with the cost, the easy solution is to cut off the welfare spigot, but I'd guess you'd be hostile to that idea.
"That world seems a happier one than the one where we reduce living standards by 10% to avert .1% of harm from climate change." By all accounts, the world is not a happier one because of the choices 1% have made to pretend their impacts have no negative externalities. The cost of not addressing climate change will have a bigger impact on living standards than pretending having more children will increase living standards.
There's nothing wrong with the excuse of saying "I love children" but natalists seem to think that's the only justification and demand a myriad of reasons why people chose not to have children or impune their choice not to have children.
"As to the problem of people having kids they can't afford and burdening the rest of society with the cost, the easy solution is to cut off the welfare spigot, but I'd guess you'd be hostile to that idea."
I'm hostile to the idea that natalist get their panties in a twist about low birth rates and their insistence that having lots of kids is the answer to what ails humanity. Lots of people who can afford kids can also result in those kids being a burden to society. If natalists and pro-birth folks want to back up their position then they would back policies that are pro-family after birth but that isn't what we see here in the U.S.
We could spend money on family-friendly policies that make it easier / less costly for middle and low-income families to have and raise children. Instead, we're running the natural experiment in some states that if we just cut SNAP benefits back enough then the children will be incentivized to bootstrap themselves into the 0.5% of income earners in a few decades.
There's no contradiction between being pro-natal in general while also wanting less of some categories of births. Most pro-natalists are pro-eugenics, even if they don't know it yet.
It is frankly horrific to me that some people are so thoroughly in thrall to politics that they would let it dominate their life choices to the point of controlling whether or not they have children. It's even more horrific to me that the mechanism of action of this thrall isn't, like, nazis pointing guns at people, but rather self-imposed and mediated by neurotic guilt. The fact of having that conversation at all should be a massive wake-up call to people that hey, maybe they need to walk away from the nightmare rectangle in their pocket for a while.
Also, #import my canned rant about how sickening it is that people feel the obligation to run mathematical calculations on utility and appeal to authorities, out of some perverse need to always have something else they can point to to justify their decisions, instead of just "I'm an adult human being with freedom and agency, and I'm allowed to make decisions about my life". The fact that the decision under discussion is one of the most natural decisions that have ever existed, a decision that has already been made _billions_ of times, by people who definitely didn't bust out a spreadsheet first, just emphasizes this even more
Remember when we all agreed that "politics is the mind killer"? I 'member
I think this is being uncharitable. A lot of people think the world is going to end in a really horrible way. It makes sense not to want to have children if they're going to live a horrible life and then die young. That's not a political decision.
Perhaps you're familiar with the term solastalgia. Glen Albrecht coined the term to describe the psychological stress that people were experiencing as they watched their immediate environment being transformed via natural disaster or man-made disaster. Albrecht coined it when studying the effects of strip mining in Australia on people who lived near open-cast coal mines. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20151030-have-you-ever-felt-solastalgia
I've discussed it in the past with my therapist when I was having a lot of stress as a result of work and other impacts that were happening locally, as well as what I observed to places I grew up that became exacerbated after I had my second child. The solastalgia wasn't bad enough to cause us to stop having kids but it did reframe how I was going to raise my kids moving forward, especially living in south Louisiana and the yearly disruptions that hurricanes, flooding, and tropical storms can cause. We're here because my wife has family here and they're a great support base. But that doesn't lessen the long-term concerns I have for my kids.
Relocating back to Colorado wouldn't relieve the impacts of climate change either. Considering I've watched my home state be transformed by continued drought and worsening fire season over the last 20yrs along with some not-so-smart development growth that has exacerbated water shortages and increased risks of wildfires along the wildland-urban interface.
I think your post brings up valid points about taking into consideration, the long view of future climate change impacts but I also think the immediate impacts can't be ignored especially for current parents and future parents.
politics is literally collective decision-making, mindkiller or not you wont be able to avoid it just try to make modern politics poison your group less often.
The argument about future elections seems flawed. It is not an accident that elections are very close: the parties are strongly incentivised to position themselves in a way that appeals to approximately the number of people they need to win elections. If you removed 1% of the electorate's left wing, the Democrats wouldn't sit there losing elections for ever, they'd just move slightly to the right until they picked up enough centrists to restore the equilibrium. So there is an effect on policy outcomes, but it's roughly proportional to the population change rather than being hugely amplified by elections as claimed.
Except it's a new phenomenon that elections are close. Democrats controlled the House for the 38 years between 1955 and 1993. If you look at past presidential elections, Reagan won the popular vote by 59% vs. 41%, and the electoral vote by 525 vs. 13.
Right, there used to be a lot more variance in presidential elections, but my point is about the averages. What I'm claiming is you couldn't have variance as low as today, but where (say) one party consistently gets about 400 electoral votes and the other 138. In other words, if it's going to settle anywhere, it has to settle on being close.
Your House example is more troublesome to my claim. But the same two parties run in multiple elections held under different systems, and presumably have to have a vaguely consistent platform across those elections. Perhaps aiming for the presidency and the Senate was enough to secure Republican policy priorities, so it wasn't worth them drifting leftward enough to be competitive in the House.
I don't disagree with the points you made, and I agree people should have children if they want without worrying about the impact on the planet of future generations although I do think you overlooked a part of the debate…a "no child carbon credit."
My reasons for not having a child are certainly not 100% based on the damage that future generations would do to the planet, however…I do consider the lack of damage done future generations when making decisions about my *own* carbon footprint.
I am not arguing that I should get a government carbon tax credit for not having children (although that would be nice for me, but make things worse for the world) but I am far less concerned about my consumption/carbon footprint because of how the math works out in the future if I do not procreate.
I don't know how familiar you are with Scott and his body of work. He is part of a community that spends a lot of time thinking about improving the lives of all people, which in practice focuses efforts on 'third world'. I assure you whatever you seem to be inferring isn't who he is. Is just a word choice that communicates what he is referring to not a loaded political view.
I might agree if the article were trying to solve the problem of whether people in general should have more or fewer children. But it's not--it's quite clearly advice addressed to the readership of this blog (i.e. almost entirely people in the wealthier half of the Western world) who are uncertain about having children either A) out of concern for those potential children or B) out of concern for, as you say, "members of the Second and Third Worlds and the entire natural world."
The argument to people with concern A doesn't hinge on the suffering of other people because if it did it would fail to address their concern. The question is "Is my child safe?" not "Are most children safe?", and it hardly seems monstrous or racist for a parent to be interested in the answer to that.
The argument to people with concern B clearly does value the lives and well-being of other people: its whole premise is that your decision to have a child or not is based entirely on whether it will cause strangers in distant places to suffer.
What terms would you prefer to use to refer to parts of the world that are highly economically developed and the parts that are not? What a weird comment.
I hear you that it feels strange to hear outdated references to the “First / Third World” even though so many of us moved on to “Developed / Developing World” years ago (which has its problems too but I’m not sure anything has replaced it). This crowd is not interested in staying current with socially acceptable language, but they have some good ideas. It’s worth looking past the language.
This user was banned for this comment. If they're going to be this nasty and confrontational over someone using the perfectly standard term "First World", I don't imagine them being a net positive here in general.
BTW, people use developed/developing or global north/global south now as first/second/third worlds are really anachronisms and misuses of Cold War concepts (i.e. Urugray and Yugoslavia technically are third world and they were/are modern developed societies)
One thing I find frustrating in this sort of conversation is the equivocation between "collapse of civilization" and "existential threat." (Scott isn't doing this too much, but the linked Vox piece definitely is.) The idea that climate change will literally cause human extinction is ridiculous. But the idea that climate change will bring down the governments of most countries, lead to mass movements that create new cultures and destroy old ones, and precipitate a century or two of techno-economic decline, political decentralization, and widespread small-scale warfare is... well, not necessarily likely, but plausible. If that's not a civilizational collapse, then no civilization has ever collapsed. More importantly, it's not an outcome bad enough to be treated as remotely similar to the extinction of the species.
These, too, are very implausible IMO based on the predicted effects of global warming, at least in richer countries (assuming that, by bringing down governments, we mean something more than some party losing an election or a president resigning—these can happen over much less).
To be clear, by "plausible" in this case I mean about 0.1%-1% chance--it's like developing schizophrenia or a bit less likely than that, not like developing lycanthropy. (Though you might think that range is still too high.) By "bringing down governments" I do mean forms of government, not administrations, particularly if they aren't replaced quickly and peacefully (e.g. the last decade in Libya). I don't think climate changes and natural disasters could do that directly in any developed country, but the destabilization of the rest of the world combined with economic troubles at home could.
I was disappointed in this post. I think Climate Change is probably Scott's weakest subject (of those he writes about) and sometimes sounds as if the information has been regurgitated from somewhere like Vox or the Guardian.
The 1% chance of Venus-like conditions is a good example. Hitchen's razor applies but I'd go straight to Nasa head honcho Gavin Schmidt who has variously described the odds of this scenario as "vanishingly small" and "essentially zero".
Or 'Probably trillions have already been lost to disasters and agricultural problems'. Again, Hitchen's razor is appropriate - the relevant literature says something quite different. Climate disasters account for about 0.2% of the world's economy and that proportion is falling not rising. And that of course is Climate, not climate change.
In a similar fashion to many people who worry about climate changing, it seems that imagination is what creates many of these guesses - and fear driven imagination at that.
An acid test is to ask whether the climate mortality rates of 100 years time will be higher or lower than those of 100 years ago. If you are familiar with any of the literature and you avoid just imagining stuff, you'll know that the climate mortality rate of the future will be a tiny fraction of that of the past.
Any casual review of crop yields over the past 150 years of warming (spoiler: they have increased dramatically, about 5x) would remove one's worry about losses already incurred.
This doesn't mean there is zero impact, it just means that it is a small factor relatively and I very much doubt they can reliably measure a climate impact one way or the other. At the base level increases in CO2 help plant production.
I broadly agree that this isn't the best place for deep analysis of climate change, but I don't think your examples are very strong.
In context, the 1% figure for the Venus scenario was pretty clearly not Scott's actual belief--he is using a ridiculously high figure to make the point that it's not worth worrying about even if "everybody's wrong" about how unlikely it is, i.e. even if the experts are far too optimistic.
The world's cumulative real GDP over the past sixty years is over $2,500 trillion, more than $1,000 trillion of which was in the past fifteen years. If the cost of climate disasters was 0.2% throughout (though you say it was higher at the beginning of that period), then those disasters have in fact cost trillions. You are right to point out that that is climate, not climate change, but I think Scott's guess here is only off by an order of magnitude or so, which is forgivable given that it's flagged as a guess and he's not resting anything on it (in fact, if it's an overestimate that can only strengthen his case). Also, some costs of climate change, including agricultural problems, probably don't show up as "climate disasters."
I think there is an argument to be made that many of the approaches to reducing carbon emissions, certainly including declining to have children, are actually counterproductive, insofar as they erode general prosperity. A prosperous people are far better equipped to protect the environment than an unprosperous people. See recycling, for example.
If carbon footprint reduction is the real goal (a big if, sadly), then any steps taken in the name of that goal must demonstrably contribute towards it.
Of course a demographic EXplosion is very resource-consuming, but an IMplosion has serious economical implications that very much reduce the ability to protect the environment. It seems to me that a stable demographic is by far preferable.
I can take the NYC example in well enough, but then we are not just dealing with an isolated event that will only involve NYC, but a massive global event that will have ripple effects that will create as yet unthought of negative feedback loops. We're also dealing with the ongoing loss of biodiversity, ocean acidification, deforestation, food and water security, for starters. What will the future look like? Certainly not like your example of NYC.
Why do you think there is an ongoing problem with food security? Global per capita food supply at least is increasing (https://ourworldindata.org/food-supply). How will a loss of biodiversity, ocean acidification or deforestation affect me?
Humanity thrives in a very wide range of climates. We also have a wide variety of crops, producing food in a wide variety of climates. Even with complex ripple effects and large changes to the climate, the climate of most of the Earth would fall well within the range in which humans are living and doing fine right now.
As far as your personal world being affected by deforestation and ocean acidification you could just look at how an airborne virus has affected global supply chains because this is one effect that no one saw coming. I have no idea how your personal world will be affected by these calamities, but rest assured, it will feel the "pinch" because it exists within a larger, more complex system.
Those people who are immediately affected, do you think that they are just going to sit down and die? Some of them probably will, but most of them are going to shake whatever tree that's around and once they start shaking, reverberations, my friend, reverberations.
How confident are we that carbon emissions per person has been declining rapidly since 2000? https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions make it look like it has gone down moderately in Europe but not much in America.
I agree with your conclusion, but you should not be so willing to believe alarmist scare stories.
"This has already been pretty bad, with unusually many hurricanes, wildfires, and droughts."
The IPCC claimed that climate change had increased droughts in the fourth report, retracted that claim in the fifth. For hurricanes, a long discussion by Chris Landsea, who wrote a substantial part of one of the IPCC report's section on hurricanes is at:
If you actually read the IPCC reports with care, instead of the news media, things look a lot less bleak. Here are some of my favorite quotes:
There is no evidence that surface water and groundwater drought frequency has changed over the last few decades, although impacts of drought have increased mostly due to increased water demand.
Economic losses due to extreme weather events have increased globally, mostly due to increase in wealth and exposure, with a possible influence of climate change (low confidence in attribution to climate change).
Some low-lying developing countries and small island states are expected to face very high impacts that, in some cases, could have associated damage and adaptation costs of several percentage points of GDP.
... most recent observed terrestrial-species extinctions have not been attributed to recent climate change, despite some speculative efforts (high confidence).
With these recognized limitations, the incomplete estimates of global annual economic losses for additional temperature increases of ~2°C are between 0.2 and 2.0% of income ... .
I was also struck some years ago by a piece written by William Nordhaus responding to a WSJ OpEd that argued that climate change was not a catastrophe requiring immediate response. His calculation at the time was that the net cost of doing nothing for fifty years instead the optimal policy starting immediately was about $4.1 trillion. Spread out over a century and the entire world, that works out to a reduction of average world GNP of about one twentieth of one percent. He didn't put it that way. You can find my comments on his piece and a link to it at:
Richard Tol characterised the non-alarming perspective (as an IPCC lead author) by suggesting a century of climate change would cost a year or two of economic growth.
We are having a debate here with completely different "facts" (assuming facts is a term we can use on multi decade model projections of complex phenomena).
David, you and I seem to be operating under the assumption of the IPCC scenarios which suggest that climate change is serious, with serious defined as requiring a couple of years extra time before average global income quadruples.
Scott (in an above comment) believes that it is quite likely that entire cities in Africa will be destroyed by draught, leading to millions dying of thirst.
Half the youth in London seem to believe that the risk is existential, meaning total civilizational collapse or worse?
Before we discuss whether or not to have a child, I think we need to narrow our assumptions a bit
That is true, but both of us disagree with the narrative that is used to argue against having a child, which is pretty close to "we will all die."
Two other points. Over the next century, we can expect, with or without climate change, something like ten to twenty billion deaths, so a few million mean a change of something like .1%. Economic growth can be expected to reduce death rates, via increased life expectancy, by much more than that, judged by past experience.
Also, "cause millions of deaths" is a bit ambiguous. Rising temperature may well increase the number of people who die over the next century from heat by several millions. It may also decrease the number who die from cold by several millions. Does that count as "cause millions of deaths"?
Finally, ACT on the most-talked-about scare of the day.
Here is a take I have not seen in the media so far:
We are facing a moral dilemma when reporting & preparing for increased global warming, but it is not any of the usual suspects.
The actual moral dilemma is this: Is it ok to exaggerate how bad the effects of global warming (and accompanying climate change) already are, in order to get people off their arses & to do something to limit the risk of future runaway global warming, or should one always “tell the truth” ?
To elaborate: Global warming so far is modest, approx. 1,5 degrees from whatever you choose as the baseline. A modest increase usually has only modest consequences.
Ocean rise so far has been very modest. Climate change so far is also very modest.
If you read the underlying material (caveat: I have far from read the whole most recent IPCC report, but I have read chapter 3 and 11 in some additional bits, plus some of the underlying articles) you see some statistically significant climate changes across time, but statistically significant change is not the same as dramatic change. Some registered climate changes are statistically significant, but judging from the time series available you would be hard pressed to label any of them “dramatic”.
There are also some positive effects of the modest temperature rise we have seen so far, most notably deaths from extreme cold is declining – and at least in the Northern hemisphere, 95 percent of temperature-related death are related to cold peaks (not warm peaks). Plus, there is a greening-of-the-planet effect.
None the less, the response in the media these days whenever there is a forest fire, or a flood, or a heavy rainfall somewhere on the planet, is immediately to blame “global warming”. This may suggest conformation bias, and in any case we all know that monocausal explanations are usually wrong.
However, I want to offer an alternative explanation for the almost conditioned response of the media whenever they report anything related to “climate”: People in the media are morally dedicated people who know what they are doing, and what they do is deliberately playing up the present negative effects of global/working/climate change beyond what is strictly speaking “truth”, “for the good of the cause”.
I must stress that I am very open for the possibility that this is indeed a praiseworthy moral stance. But then again, it might not be. Hence we are facing a genuine moral dilemma – on behalf of people working in the media, as well as everyone else that is a potential opinion-leader. Including many ACT readers, I would recon.
To further elaborate the dilemma: If we instead tell the present-day truth, i.e. that the effects of global warming are modest so far, people (i.e. the great unwashed) may become complacent, and not geared up to “do something”, or at least “accept something”. Implying that if/when continuous global warming starts to bite for real, it is too late to do something.
How to respond to this moral dilemma? It depends on whether you are a Kantian or a Machiavellian (yes, Machiavelli has a moral theory).
If you are a Kantian, you should never tell a lie. Not to tell a lie is a principle, and you should follow principles regardless of the consequences. If you follow your principles, you can disregard if the consequences of your acts are desirable or not. (The Germans have a wonderful word for this moral stance: Prinzipentreue – to your principles always be true.)
Thus if a Kantian, you should never exaggerate present-day knowledge that global warming so far has had only modest negative effects, and may even have had some positive effects. If the effect of “telling this truth” is that people become complacent and global warming wrecks havoc on the world a hundred years from now, so be it. You told the truth – come hell or high water (levels).
If you instead are a Machiavellian, you believe that what is ethically important are the consequences of your acts, not if your principles are “pure”. Instead, the end justifies the means. (A saying often ascribed to the Jesuits, but Machiavelli is also a representative of this view.)
If a Machiavellian, you can defend to exaggerate (tweak the truth) as regards the consequences of global warming so far, in order to “wake people up” to do something/accept restrictions, and thus to limit the probability that global warming spins out of control 50/100 years from now.
Finally getting to Scott's worry: That some young people become so hysterical due to these media exaggerations that they abstain from having children can be regarded as a sort of collateral damage.
If you are a Machiavellian, this is an acceptable negative side-effect. Kantians would be horrified, but then they would be horrified anyway, at any exaggeration of present-day consequences of global warming.
So this is the moral question we should ask ourselves: Is it ok to exaggerate the consequences global warming already have, in order to lower the probability that global warming spins out of control in the future, or is it always wrong to exaggerate what is our best knowledge?
The answer probably lies in another question: Do you actually read the media's climate reporting any longer? I rarely do because of the problem referenced. If a large segment of the people believe you are exaggerating then you have lost the credibility to achieve your objective.
I would suggest a lot of this exaggeration is much more mundane than a grand moral dilemma, fear sells and the accountability for overselling this particular fear is always decades away to a new reader.
One problem is that, every time you do that, you increase the number of people who don't trust what are supposed to be the authoritative sources of information. One of my standard examples is Fauci, who openly admitted in a NYT interview that his statements about what is required for herd immunity change according to what he wants people to believe — specifically, that he was raising the estimate in response to polling evidence about how many people were willing to get vaccinated.
Eventually, people correctly conclude that the authoritative sources of information, whether Fauci or the NYT, cannot be trusted, so they might as well believe what they want to believe. I've been arguing on that basis that Fauci, generalized to lots of other people, is the reason that many Republicans believe the election was stolen. The reputable sources of information tell them, I think correctly, that it wasn't, but those sources also claimed that Covid couldn't have been a lab leak and that Hunter Biden's hard drive didn't show anything real and important, was just some sort of Russian disinformation. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.
And we are left with no way of coordinating the beliefs of the general population.
I'm curious your perspective on this... is it your sense that media and political leaders like the NYT and Fauci are bigger lying liars than we've had in previous eras and that's why we are left with no way of coordinating the beliefs of the general population?
It seems to me we've always had lots of big lying liars and that the problem now is that those big lying liars don't have as hegemonic a sway over public belief. I don't know where to start this decomposition of the hegemony of media and political leaders, but maybe from the Vietnam War and Watergate onwards (in the U.S. obviously) and then layering on the internet and social media.
My hope is we're on the way to somewhere else that this is an awkward middle phase for. In other words, that we needed to dethrone some of the authority of the big lying liars (since after all they had been lying about a great many things for a long time). But we're having to pass through the valley of "it's all just stories, man" on the way hopefully to some new way to assess truth claims?
> bigger lying liars than we've had in previous eras
I think that nowadays - for multiple reasons - it is easier to notice then in past.
I would expect that lying (or misleading earnestly held beliefs) are actually less often held by rulers. For example nowadays it is fairly rare for ruler to claim to be a God.
(it is also easier to spread lies that XYZ is a big lying liar what makes entire thing more complex)
Another perspective is that the religious wars and civil wars of the 16th and 17th century Europe was the last shake out period between lying liars. This time the ideologies are just more secular.
Interesting question. The experience that I think of as my loss of innocence, discovering that respectable academics I liked were willing to publish deliberately misleading information in order to persuade people to what they thought was the right conclusion, was in the late sixties.
Thanks for sharing that, I went and read your post and the one you linked to in there. Those kind of first-hand experiences of how the sausage is made is enough to make a life-long vegetarian (metaphorically speaking).
I think of this dynamic as something like a distortion field. Like the more politically salient and contentious (or profitable?) an arena of research is, the more likely it's towards the center of a distortion field rather than out on the edges of it where things like sloppy statistics or the researcher's less-than-perfect protocols or excessive attachment to an outcome also distort results.
It's my assumption that this is a universal human dynamic of the sort "power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely." That it has always been so and that it plays out in science is infuriating and unsurprising (except it's always surprising when we encounter it first-hand and witness the bald egregiousness of it).
Maybe we could say that the internet and social media have elevated Discourse so much that more subjects are ever more prone to the distortion field, and so perhaps science is being ever more distorted than it was before. I don't know how to weigh that up against the fact that methods in science have gotten better over time. Or up against how much profit motive has ever more deeply infused the practice of science.
And then in my field (psychology) there's the whole other dynamic that the quality of research is generally so bad and the answers for people in need so inadequate that practitioners are constantly overreaching in trying to use "science" and "evidence" as a fig leaf to cover a vast stretch of uncertainty (sausage? I'm sorry...) that is so much bigger than can be covered by a fig leaf. I'm not really sure my mixed metaphor works there. :)
There are several excellent posts in the immediate thread above that are certainly worth a deeper dive, summed up by the succinct expression, "Machiavellian altruism (as this moral stance is sometimes called) has a signalling problem."
On many issues, including climate, COVID, and racism, the Blue Church starts from a legitimate foundation (each is a legitimate and important moral and policy concern), but then a selection mechanism develops in which congregants amplify messages that exaggerate on behalf of the "good cause" and penalize messages (and messengers) that do not exaggerate on behalf of the "good cause." Bit by bit more of us become Blue Church apostates because of the accumulated falsehoods that have become widely accepted dogmas within the church.
Some of the Blue Church apostates, no longer trusting the establishment, then accept all sorts of right wing craziness. The Blue Church establishment sees the craziness and doubles down on the on the enforcement of orthodoxy, in part because many of them now believe the most extreme exaggerations on their own side which are no longer based in empirical reality. This doubling down behavior includes the persecution of apostates and heretics, due to fear that if they allow dissenting voices back into the church, the right wing crazies will win. When apostate and heretic voices are no longer allowed, The Blue Church faithful now only hear the voices of the most loyal enforcers, which further constrains their view of reality. They then enforce this more constrained version, further limiting access to heretical information.
Rinse and repeat ad nauseam.
Honest brokers across partisan divides and ideological chasms, and those who support and promote such brokers, are our only hope.
I agree. And this gets to the real problem IMO. The existential threat is not and never has been climate change. The threat is politically inspired mistakes promoted by those exaggerating and weaponizing the issue against apostates. Making a silly list of real threats and my estimates of their likelihood going forward…
1. We do something stupid to fight climate change which derails the engines of prosperity causing the deaths and impoverishment of billions. (>25% chance)
2. The secular religion of the blue church drives apostates out of institutions and this results in a horrific backlash or civil war. This impoverishes billions. ( (>15% chance)
3.
4.etc
99. Climate change is so severe that it doesn’t just act as a headwind to human prosperity (as currently concluded by the IPCC) but that it leads to massive destabilization, poverty and death. (<1% chance)
Agreed as well. My wife is African, and the prospect of your #1 is all too real in Africa. Reliable, affordable energy is critical to advancing prosperity in Africa, and NGOs and multilateral institutions are already aggressively fighting fossil fuel development in Africa. For one of many case studies, Uganda is ready to bring their oil to the market but 250 NGOs are pressuring commercial banks not to lend money for the project,
It is Orwellian to live in a world in which "black lives matter" but leading "altruistic" organizations are fighting hard to keep black Africa poor.
One could estimate African growth scenarios with and without affordable, reliable energy and thus come up with a decent calculation of how many black deaths (e.g. infant and maternal mortality declines pretty reliably with GDP growth, indoor air pollution due to cooking with biomass instead of gas or electric in 700 million African homes causes 1-2 million deaths annually, prosperity will result in other public health improvements, etc.) will be caused by these efforts to halt fossil fuel development and usage in Africa.
It should be obvious, but an Africa in 2100 with an average GDP per capita of $50K (or $80K) will be far better off than an Africa in 2100 with an average GDP per capita of $10K (or $20K). I'd like to see EA do various scenarios of the tradeoffs with respect to human life associated with X degree of growth in Africa vs. y temperature increase due to climate change.
If anyone has seen such analysis, I'd love to see it.
Thanks for this insight into how some NGOs behave in Africa. Shameful.
My prior (as they say in this forum) has been that rulers in African countries shake their heads and smile (in private) of high-income country worries of the distant global warming problem, since they have the more immediate problem of fighting abject here-and-now poverty. (As I believe rulers in India and China do, witness their steady introduction of new coal power plants.)
However, your post suggests that "green" NGOs may get the banks on their side. If so, perhaps they will actually succeed in slowing down African poverty alleviation for decades to come.
I would still assume, though, that such NGOs fight a losing battle in the long run, since any ruler not going for cheap electricity in a situation with widespread poverty may fear not to be a ruler for long.
Realistically, the only thing that can prevent rulers in low-and middle income countries from sooner or later firing up the coal and oil plants, is R&D that succeeds in creating alternative, stable power sources roughly as cheap as coal.
Nuclear and hydroelectric fit the bill, but the Greens do not like either of them. Solar and wind are too expensive and too unstable. Perhaps we may hope for breakthrough innovations in geothermal energy.
In lieu of R&D breakthroughs, "China to the African rescue" perhaps. The Chinese do not have the same "green" qualms as Western donors in their lending policies.
I am no fan of China's leader-for-life, but if decent governments in high-income countries neglect the basic interests of people in low-and-middle income countries, be not surprised if less-decent governments see a window of opportunity.
Big time agree. China Already 30% of the new power plants being built in Africa are by Chinese contractors partially controlled by the Chinese government,
> The actual moral dilemma is this: Is it ok to exaggerate how bad the effects of global warming (and accompanying climate change) already are, in order to get people off their arses & to do something to limit the risk of future runaway global warming, or should one always “tell the truth” ?
Whether it's morally okay or not to lie, it doesn't even seem to have the desired effect. A decent fraction of the population is smart enough to realise that they're being lied to, even if they're not able to figure out exactly what the truth is on their own, and will reject the message. Hence we have the current state of the "climate debate" which is polarised between people who say "At this rate we'll be Venus by 2025" and people who say "Nope, that's obviously phony, global warming is fake, environmental problems aren't real". There's no room left for sensible discussions, and a good fraction of the population is now opposed to _anything_ you could do to help the environment because they associate environmental concerns with obvious lies.
A similar situation just played itself out in fast motion over the past couple of years with the pandemic. A lot of "noble lies" were told throughout the pandemic in order to try to influence people's behaviour. A lot of predictions were made which turned out to be vastly exaggerated, and a lot of specific actions were mandated which probably didn't have much effect. But the real problem is that when we finally had something we _could_ usefully do about the virus (getting a vaccine), a large fraction of the population (particularly in the US) noticed that the people telling them to get the vaccine were the same people who had been lying to them nonstop over every other aspect of the pandemic for the last two years.
As a result, a significant number of people are refusing to do the one very simple no-brainer action that you can take to protect yourself and others from a deadly disease because they've closed their ears after a couple of years of mask-related bullshit.
Yes to this, and for me it is a sadness that there is very little room for sensible discussions. If you survey the climate blogosphere, there is barely a single forum that isn't totally overrun with partisans of one flavour or another.
Excellent comment Melvin, especially the extension of the same issue to COVID. We also seem to have similar patterns with the current dialogues on racism, inequality and immigration.
> Is it ok to exaggerate the consequences global warming already have, in order to lower the probability that global warming spins out of control in the future, or is it always wrong to exaggerate what is our best knowledge?
I want just to say that people deliberately lying with this justification are fools, destructors and idiots. <insert link to Moloch essay before edits here>
Though there is probably quite large pool of people doing this not as deliberate lies, what is just stupid and destroying our ability to coordinate.
(Obviously, opposite - completely denying global warming etc is even worse as this has not even justification of exaggerating something that happens. Representatives of oil companies deliberately lying is something that should be illegal and so on.)
Beyond what others have said, there is another problem: There is no Inner Party. You may imagine that there is a Cabal of scientists, journalists, and perhaps random smart people like you, who know the Truth, and decides what to tell the Plebs in a Machiavellian fashion. If the Cabal knows that global warming is a moderate problem, but it also knows that the Plebs will take global warming less seriously than the Cabal tells them, then the Cabal tells the Plebs that it's a big problem, and the Plebs will then treat it as a moderate problem, just as they should.
But it doesn't work like this. The members of the "Cabal" mislead not only the Plebs, but also each other. After all, why do you think that it's plausibly a good thing to motivate people to get off their asses by exaggerating global warming? Because you believe that it's a big problem. Why do you believe it's a big problem? Perhaps because others have lied to you in the same manner. And *they* believed it was a big problem because they have been lied to in the same manner.
(In reality, I think it's not usually conscious lies as much as bias: they eagerly repeat any argument for it without checking, while they nitpick any counter-argument.)
Even journalists and smart people form their opinion about global warming based on what other journalists and scientists say. Even scientists only know the Truth at most about their very narrow field, but rely on journalists for everything else. A question like how alarmed we should be about global warming depends on many sub-questions (predictions of CO₂ emissions, the greenhouse effect of CO₂, the effect of feedback loops, the various consequences of a given amount of warming), and even if they have a correct picture of their own sub-field, they get an exaggerated picture of all the rest. And they can't warn each other, because they know that skeptics watch their communications (including scientific publications).
Even worse, while the Plebs are (as we see, justifiably) skeptical about what the "Cabal" tells them, members of the Cabal (scientists, journalists, other intellectuals) swallow it hook, line and sinker! After all, they are used to the notion that others in the Cabal, who are alarmed about global warming, are on the side of Science, and those who question them are stupid science-deniers.
So, say, the Cabal starts out correctly believing that global warming is a moderate problem. They say this, but the Plebs don't give a damn. So the Cabal starts saying that global warming is a big problem. Now the Plebs believe it's a moderate problem, but the Cabal now believes it's a big problem, since they believe each other's exaggerations! So they are worried because the Plebs only consider it a moderate problem, so now the Cabal says it's a catastrophic problem. And so on.
So we have a spiral, where we start out with some moderate belief, with moderate confidence, which is justified, and we end up deluding ourselves (or, rather, each other) without bound. This repeats in many controversies. E.g. doctors start out with a moderately confident belief that ivermectin probably doesn't treat COVID, and we end up—even before any new evidence emerges—at the point where everyone must be maximally against the possibility that it might treat it, and those anyone saying otherwise must be censored on social media.
Thanks for a really excellent line of reasoning 10240. I believe you are right: Machiavellian altruism (as this moral stance is sometimes called) has a signalling problem.
I am also enthusiastic about your attempt to generalize the logic at play here. The Elite signalling to the Plebs and in the process getting into a spiral of ever-stronger self-delusion might be at work across many policy fields, and across different political systems. (Digression: Albert “The good Nazi” Speer reflects in his autobiography Inside the Third Reich that a problem with making rational decisions inside an autocracy is that the elite gradually starts to believe its own propaganda.)
For the record: I agree with you that this is unlikely to be a fully conscious/deliberate process. Not least since we – due to the sheer information costs involved in forming accurate opinions on thousands of policy issues – instead form most of our political beliefs based on simple heuristics and cognitive rules-of-thumb. Like: who do you trust to normally be well-informed and sensible informants? (In principal-agent theory, such informed actors that others trust are labelled “intermediate agents”.)
This sets the stage for these perverse-signal-spirals, ending up perhaps deluding primarily members of the Elite themselves. And as you indicate this can be a serious problem, not least since the Elite – unlike the Plebs – actually have power.
So hey there is stuff here for an excellent political science article!! Maybe even a book.
An interesting follow-up question could be if there are ways Machiavellian altruists can overcome this signalling problem, or at least soften it?
Which is an interesting problem if you can assume that the alternative, always behaving like Immanuel I-cannot-tell-a-lie Kant, is unlikely to get the Plebs off their asses. (Bear with me and assume, at least for the sake of argument, that this is a real problem when it comes to global warming.)
Or are we stuck with a type of fatalism: “Things must get seriously much worse, so much worse that even a child can see it, before we can solve the moderate problem of global warming”.
I agree with this, tho' I think a lot of people can go from no information at all to outright panic without wandering up a feedback loop-spiral.
It seems that most of us head off in one of two directions (alarmed v anti-alarmed) just from our first framing, perhaps because of our dispositions. And confirmation bias + motivated reasoning is the fuel that keeps us heading in the same direction irrespective of reality - climate-wise we are all as mad as can be.
A blogger I know begins from the starting point that climate change is an EMERGENCY!! because "If human beings altering the climate isn't an emergency, then what is?" This initial framing is ever present so all new 'facts' have to fit in with this accordingly. It is therefore no surprise that after a decade or so of this process the blogger has begun to believe that the whole of classical economics needs to be overturned because it doesn't come up with sufficient climate damages to fit their fevered imagination. And this blogger isn't a hysterical environmentalist, he's a professor of physics!
Most of the * media reported * climate mantra is terrible and not well thought out. Climate change will have costs, but the alarmism is rampant, rarely challenged, and mostly incoherent.
News bulletin #1: Areas aren't abandoned because sea level rises ~1 inch per decade. Parts of New Orleans and areas of Europe have been getting along just fine living below sea level for quite a while. There are costs associated with this but they are increasingly manageable. Some areas are harder to protect than others.
News Bulletin #2: Lives lost to climate related disasters (notice the term not used: climate change related) have decreased markedly due to improved infrastructure and other technology, it is a fraction of what it was 100 years ago. The costs associated with these disasters is mostly even when normalized to GDP and the increasing amount of infrastructure exposed.
News Bulletin #3: People who live on the coasts (especially in the south) are not concerned with 3 feet of sea level rise in the next 80 years, they are concerned with up to 20 foot of sea level rise in a matter of hours. Hurricane storm surge. Coastal building codes are regulated around this. Higher seas mean higher storm surge but this apparent fantasy that people have where large coastal areas are abandoned is a near psychotic analysis of the situation. Any modern home in FL is typically built 20 feet above sea level and older homes must be brought up to code over time.
News Bulletin #3: Major hurricanes aren't measurably really getting worse over the past 100 years, and if they are they are getting worse it is at such a small level that it is not measurable yet due to the volatility of the spares dataset. Cat3+ landfalls over the past 100 years are about level, there was a noticeable decline around the 1970's which many activists like to start their analysis at, go figure. Summary:
IPCC AR5: “Current datasets indicate no significant observed trends in global tropical cyclone frequency over the past century … No robust trends in annual numbers of tropical storms, hurricanes and major hurricanes counts have been identified over the past 100 years in the North Atlantic basin” ... “In summary, confidence in large scale changes in the intensity of extreme extratropical cyclones since 1900 is low” AR6 states increases since the 1970's but they haven't invented new ways to count hurricanes.
I find it more than a little interesting that the US had a record 11 year gap in major hurricane landfalls after 2006 and nobody noticed, but one or two active years is designated a climate change trend according to "science".
I spent a lot of time reviewing the evidence on hurricanes and sea level rise because I live in Florida. I haven't looked at wildfires in detail. I find the evidence and models to be lacking and the media to be overly biased and politically conformist (constantly treating RPC8.5 as BAU, etc). There is no particular reason to believe my take but all I can say is that the more time you spend reviewing the evidence the less trust you will have in the * reporting * of climate science. By all means go read the IPCC if you have the time and compare that to media reporting.
people are evacuating islands in Louisiana, and the erosion and hurricanes clearly is affecting Louisiana enough that you see a noticeable difference from 1980s to currently from orbital pictures. Which means New Orleans has less and less land between it and storm surge...
To para-paraphrase Mark Twain paraphrasing Thomas Jefferson: "I'm an old man, and I've lived through many end-of-the-world as-we-know-it scenarios, and none of them ever happened."
As an undergraduate in Anthropology, I was trained to look for cross-cultural patterns of belief and behaviors. And something I've observed is that there's universal need in humans to believe that world is going to end in our lifetimes. For the scientifically inclined, we love to indulge in worst-case disaster scenarios. For the Christianists, it's a belief that Jesus is going to bring on the end-times any minute now.
As one of the former group, I used to indulge in "scientific" eschatology. I'm sure I'm missing a few, but, as a kid in Jr High School, I was told by my science teachers that pollution and acidification would likely kill off all the oxygen-producing algae by the 1980s. Around the same time, The Club of Rome was telling us that we were facing a Malthusian tipping point by 2000 where the world population would outpace our ability to produce food and energy. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Kostas Tsipis and another anti-nuclear activist (whose name I've forgotten) would make their yearly rounds to college campuses warning us that nuclear winter was inevitable if we didn't immediately disarm. Around the same time people started dying of HIV/AIDS, and the epidemiologists told us that as much as one-third of world's population would die horrible deaths. And I remember our campus health officer telling us that HIV could be transmitted through kissing or even touching (There were a lot of freaked out horny kids on campus!). It went on... The Ozone Hole was going expand and all life would die under unfiltered UV radiation. Peak Oil was going to cause an economic collapse by 2010. In 1988, James Hansen told us that Global warming likely raise sea-levels by 3 to 12 feet by early 2000's (flooding Manhattan). Then there was Y2K and the preppers were heading up to mountain redoubts awaiting the collapse of civilization (Luckily all our elderly COBOL programmers were lured out of retirement to change he dates from from two bytes to four bytes in all that old code).
Somewhere along the way I became more jaded. But for the first 40 or so years of my life I was pretty damn scared that world was going to end! Eventually I realized that none of the worst-case predictions came to pass, though. And, although I think our civilization may very be past its peak, I don't think it's anything we're expecting or predicting that will cause its collapse.
All the civilizations that predated ours collapsed at some point. I can't think that our current civilization will last forever. Things that worry me are things that don't seem to be concerning anyone else. For instance, all of the breakthrough scientific innovations that have created our late 20th Century efflorescence date back to the 1950s and 1960s (except for the PCR process, which is a pretty big deal). Fusion is still 20-30 years out. Quantum computing might happen in 10 or 15 years, but its use cases are somewhat limited. Space colonies are out of the question with our current technology. So the technical underpinnings of our civilization is basically running on fumes right now. Personally, I feel lucky to have lived with what will probably be viewed in the future as golden age. But I sort of wish I had had kids. I'd tell 'em not let the doomsters get them down. ;-)
“There are indeed (who might say Nay) gloomy & hypochondriac minds, inhabitants of diseased bodies, disgusted with the present, & despairing of the future; always counting that the worst will happen, because it may happen. To these I say How much pain have cost us the evils which have never happened!”
—Thomas Jefferson, Letter to John Adams, Apr. 8, 1816
I appreciate your listing all the waves of catastrophizing. I lived through that same list and felt much the same about it at the time.
I come from an anxious line of people though we get calmer as we age. All the folks I know personally who are expressing doubts about having kids now are likewise anxious people. Society maybe needs us anxious-tending folks because our jumpiness acts as a kind of vigilant early warning system for the whole herd. But only to a point. We also wear ourselves out and many of the people around us.
Also in the early 2000s a lot of people spent a lot of time worrying that Al Qaeda would get its hands on nuclear or biological weapons and start destroying cities. Another danger that didn't quite go away, people just stopped talking and thinking about it and it stopped seeming like a problem.
We *think* Y2K could have done significant damage. We don't really know, though, do we? But corporations invested a huge amount of money in updating their systems (I know because I was part of the effort). Was that money well-spent? I remain neutral on this question.
To the indigenous, the end of the world *did* happen. And many of those issues have not been addressed yet. After all, the Ozone hole is still an issue for New Zealand and Australia for example (there are dayswhere you cant be in the sun for minutes without getting sunbburn). And we clearly lucked out on nuclear war.
I wonder if a lot of these people are still thinking under the old "population bomb" paradigm. IE, back in the '70's, there was this idea that the global population was increasing at such a rate that, if nothing were done about it, would eventually result in strained food supplies that would create famine, disease, war, and probably a few other terrible things along the way. These problems were headed off by increasing farm productivity via higher yielding crops, higher levels of capital investment, increasing globalization of food markets, etc. Now that sort of apocalyptic fear has simply been transferred from famine to climate change.
I think it was Arnold Kling (vastly underrated, btw) who speculated a while back that humans, having evolved as hunter gatherers, are probably wired for conservation, as over-harvesting plant and animal food sources could spell disaster for h-g tribes; akin to a farmer eating his seed-corn. In our modern industrial world, resources are not fixed in supply, the way they are for hunter-gatherers, and beyond that, what counts as a resource in the first place is dependent on human knowledge of how to make use of a given thing. As such, we're a lot less resource-constrained than many people tend to think. It's another example of humans living in a world that is very different from the one we evolved in, and may help explain a lot of the apocalyptic rhetoric we hear from environmentalists.
Thank you so much for writing this. It's beautifully argued and I'm sending it to friends and family who desperately need to hear it.
Aside: Could someone do a midwit meme where the dumb person is saying "moar babbies" and the midwit person has a thought bubble with a bunch of equations about lifetime carbon footprints and the smart person is saying "more babies"?
I did grad school in upstate NY and then moved to DC. That's like speedrunning the next few decades of climate change and increasing my personal average environmental temp by 6C in one weekend. (So far I'm OK in case you're worried about me.) If you look at what states are losing congress seats, it's always cold places like NY and OH. Who's gaining? Hurricane- and drought-prone hot states: AZ, FL, and TX. I would like someone to calculate average personal warming in the US just from voluntary personal migration.
Here is why I'm pretty sure that normal people don't base life decisions on climate expectations: Property values in hot states are <I>growing</I>. Nobody I've heard of says "I don't want a 30-year mortgage on a Gulf Coast house. In 30 years nobody is gonna want to live in the humid hurricane hellhole that this place will become." Actually I think people <I>should</I> reason like that. I've just never heard it. The real estate prices don't reflect any sign of it. So when people say they won't have kids because of climate change, I have a hard time taking that at face value.
Drive south 200 miles, get out of your car, welcome to the apocalypse of a 2C climate change. Miami has about a 10C higher average temperature than NYC. It's more complicated than that of course, global warming changes aren't primarily winter based, environments need time to adapt, etc. If people from NY want to stop moving south that is fine with me, ha ha. The climate sure isn't stopping them, it's attracting them.
As much as 1° F, not 1° C. ;-) The IPCC in the AR6 seem to hedging their bets and making less dire predictions than previous reports. Looking at actual temperature data we've been tracking close lowest RCP which means an increase in global temps of 1°-1.8°C by the end of the century. Not to say it will hold that course, though, but you all my opinion of the models...
There have been articles reporting on people moving to states explicitly due to climate mitigation scenarios. And naturally, insurance companies beginning to reone the prices for coastline property.
Though it may fall into the category of 'failing to believe that other people can possibly believe what they claim to believe', I think it's important to note the (fairly or not, right-wing coded) point that basically no-one on the left is interested in promoting small-family policy outside of the anglosphere, where arguably it would have the most effect. I know there is some reasoning that improving the status of women in the developing world would naturally lead to smaller family size, but I'm inclined to interpret this as a happy coincidence - if empowering women was likely to have the opposite environmental effect, progressives would still want to do it. (I'd agree)
This combined with the (again, mostly noted on the right) tendency towards offsetting fertility decreases with immigration rather than degrowth, and rather passionate defense of all things immigration related, makes it hard for me to ignore the possibility that there is a big element of motivated reasoning to justify for an already-made decision. (Ie. Not having kids, for the usual rich nation reasons)
I mean, isn't the left obsessed abour promoting small-family policy outside of the anglosphere? I remember say people complaining about rightist groups promoting abstinence only sex education in parts of Africa as opposed to distributing condoms and teaching people how to use it (see Catholicism) for population control purposes.
This topic is so frustrating for me and now I'm frustrated all over again by all the replies along the lines of "no one who really wants kids will let intellectual arguments like this stop them". On the margin it absolutely does! Personal anecdote: You wouldn't believe how on-the-fence Bee and I have been about having more babies. An argument like this could _easily_ make the difference (if we weren't already 100% on board with it). In fact, if anyone else has other arguments, lay them on us! :)
"Life in the First World will continue, with worse weather and maybe a weaker economy, but more or less the same as always."
Exactly, life will be slightly harder and will get harder until we reach an equilibrium or intervene to prevent further climate change. A slightly worse economy probably also means the cost of having a child increases even further into absurdity i.e people with children will burden *more* of the climate change induced costs even if the average person isn't effected much.
It's certainly not just climate change that makes people decided not to have children it's climate change plus the rising cost of home ownership, higher education, health care - all things that aren't going to get any cheaper when the economy gets a haircut due to climate change.
As far as comparing the present day to 100 or 200 years ago in the past, attitudes around child rearing and the relative effort are completely flipped. 100 years ago or even just ~60 plenty of rural families had kids because children were a necessary input to staying alive past the age of 60 (gets pretty hard to run a farm yourself at that age). The most altruistic thing you did was let one or two of our offspring inherit the farm.
Compare that to the modern day in first world countries, children are a net cost. You are responsible for raising them and making sure they can compete in the global economy. Since you are responsible for their future it makes sense to factor in the impact of climate change on the future economy.
Economic growth will continue globally but in western countries we might see the CoL increase faster than local economic growth and certainly faster than wage growth. If you have a child you have to just hope they are lucky enough to have aptitudes in one of the remaining prosperous careers.
India has a worse economy than the United States. Does that mean it's costlier to raise a child in India than in the US, or that Indians can't afford to have as many children as Americans?
Certainly not, it is relative to COL. A slightly worse economy in my mind means that wages will be depressed faster than key cost of living metrics do. The US has a vested interest in keeping asset prices high more (Real estate, Pharma IP, etc.) than it has an interest in keeping wages high. Any country dependent on consistent economic growth will be hit harder than you would expect.
How much parents normally spend on children depends not only on price levels but on incomes: we can't give the cost of raising a child as a fixed value. And indeed, there seems to be no general rule that people in worse economies have fewer children, at least across countries; so it's not obvious that there should be such a correlation across generations in the same country.
Relative to cost of living, Indians are much poorer than Americans. International comparisons are routinely made in terms of purchasing power parity, which takes account of different costs of living in different countries.
Scott, this is the worst thing you have ever written. You are terrible at understanding why other people hold views that you do not. When people say that they are not having kids due to climate change, they're not saying that out of concern for the world. They are saying it out of concern for their kids.
Section 1 was dedicated to arguing that the kids will be alright. Out of the three sections, it's the longest and has the most detail. Did you have a specific problem with one of his arguments?
He very intentionally cherry-picks the least concerning, and least meaningful, measures of the effects of climate change -- no one cares about minor increases in sea level, people care about the fish dying off, previously contained diseases running rampant, natural disasters, increasing food prices. He ignores the knock-on and non-linear effects of climate change -- effects do not and are not staying contained, and it is ridiculous to think that they will or are. And he massively understates how bad things already are -- hell, last year everything around my hometown burned down and I had to rig my home into an air purification system. Today me and my wife battled shortages of basic supplies, half-way around the world.
This is a paper-thin justification of something he already wanted to believe.
Why do you expect rising food prices? Crop yields have continued to rise during the first century+ of warming. Doubling CO2 concentration, roughly the IPCC projection for the end of the century, increases the yield of most crops by about 30% and reduces their need for water.
What your argument comes down to is "the reasonably predictable and measurable negative effects of climate change are minor, but other things that I can imagine happening and you can't prove won't happen are huge."
Why would you expect climate change to on average make the world a worse place? The current climate wasn't designed for us, and humans currently prosper across a range of climates much larger than the projected change. At the high end of warming estimates, by the end of the century Minnesota might be nearly as warm as Iowa is now.
I think part of the answer is here in this that Black Cat says "last year everything around my hometown burned down and I had to rig my home into an air purification system."
If Black Cat is in California, the last couple of years of wildfires has really affected people in a profound way. I can imagine how arguments about it not being that bad would not be well received in those quarters.
Of all the unconvincing "this was totally caused by climate change" arguments, I find the one about wildfires to be one of the least convincing. Massive fires in California would still be a regular occurrence if the Earth were one degree cooler.
Sea level rise is a "minor issue?" First I'm hearing about it. I suspect this is just the whack-a-mole effect.
"fish dying off,[vague, which fish] previously contained diseases running rampant,[example?] natural disasters,[vague] increasing food prices[actual falsifiable prediction, hasn't happened so far, little reason to assume it will considering carbon fertilization and Canada and Russia]"
Do you think nobody should have had kids before the advent of modern medicine/the industrial revolution/the enlightenment/whatever, out of concern for their kids? Or do you think that wildfires and shortages make life today worse than in those times? If the former, Scott explicitly says his arguments are not addressed to you. If the latter... I reckon you're just wrong.
Let us not forget that people had kids, sometimes many of them, in previous periods of gloom and doom, BUT they did so primarily for two reasons;
1. They needed those kids for their own well-being. No welfare system, no socialized health care, no pensions, no options for paid senior care. Only the the very wealthy had no worries about the types of situations that would require these social services, and they were thoroughly indoctrinated into need at least 'an heir and a spare'. Plus of course, if you're living on a family farm (as most did) or running a small family business (as many did, blacksmithing and such), you needed those kids' hands at work very early.
2. Since the industrial revolution, most people in 'developed' countries didn't have good info/access to even moderately reliable birth-control, so not having kids mostly meant not having sex. An option few will choose.
I also think that young adults these days (I have three of them in my house as we speak, eating leftovers from Canadian Thanksgiving, two my own offspring) see their own lives as much more precarious in many ways, not just because of climate change but in general. And they have absorbed the culture's beliefs about not having kids unless you can raise them well, and choosing a life for themselves that won't kill them with stress. If a young person believes that they will spend years, perhaps forever, in the gig economy, while trying to pay off the kind of student debt that will impede the purchase of that 'entry level' home, etc AND at the mercy of more frequent floods, storms, drought, fire, etc, I can easily imagine that having kids may not look that attractive. If they have no reason to believe that their children's lives will be any better than their own, and most likely quite a bit worse, less so still.
Come. Women tell *men* what to do with their lives every freaking moment of the day. Sauce for the goose, sauce for the gander. If you're waiting for a hypothetical future where the sexes do *not* lecture each other for their mutual "improvement" pretty much continuously, best send out for lunch, it will be a while. It might be that parents stop saying "kids these days!" and kids stop complaining about the ol' squares who Just Don't Understand sooner.
"Since the industrial revolution, most people in 'developed' countries didn't have good info/access to even moderately reliable birth-control, so not having kids mostly meant not having sex. "
That was the heart of Malthus' argument, but it wasn't true, as he obliquely concedes in a few places. Coitus interruptus is an old technology, and although it is much less reliable than modern contraception it is still reliable enough to substantially reduce birth rates. Non-vaginal intercourse is entirely reliable. Those methods were known for centuries.
The rhythm method is less clear, since it isn't clear how many people when and where had the necessary information. It again isn't 100% reliable, but it doesn't have to be to produce four kids instead of eight.
We are discussing not having any kids at all, I believe. Less reliable methods can definitely reduce the number of kids,as could the very-risky methods of abortion at the time, but for a sexually active couple or woman, would be hard pressed to create none at all.
I can say with 100% certainty that the Earth's climate will not be anywhere close to the climate of Venus in my children's lifetime and my children's children's lifetime, and on and on for the next hundred generations. (At least.) For one, nothing we do as humans is going to stop plate tectonics and freeze the crust, leading to the eventual cessation of the Earth's magnetic field. Even if we're just talking about atmospheric carbon and the greenhouse effect, Venus is way more than one or two degrees hotter. It's hundreds of degrees. (440-ish if you use Celsius, and 800 or so for Fahrenheit.) And the air is over 96% carbon dioxide. Earth's is 0.04%, even with all we pump in to it. We'll get hotter here, but we will never be like Venus in the next few thousand (or million) years.
The runaway greenhouse effect, which brought Venus (it is believed) to its current state, is based around *water vapor*. Water vapor is a strong greenhouse gas, but most of Earth's surface water is liquid. If the temperature gets higher, there'll be more vapor in the atmosphere, strengthening the warming relative to CO2 alone. If the temperature gets high enough, every degree of temperature rise will cause enough evaporation to strengthen the water vapor greenhouse by a degree; at that point it's a feedback loop that gets you to 100 Celsius, and all of your surface water becomes vapor.
Over time, the water gets ionized and hydrogen escapes to space (because it's so light), bringing temperatures back down; Venus's current temperatures are the result of hundreds of millions to billions of years of volcanoes pumping CO2 into the atmosphere, without limestone deposition to remove it (as it does on Earth - CO2 enters the atmosphere from volcanoes and then exits it due to precipitating in the ocean). But since you have no oceans by that point, you kind of have other problems.
Is this going to happen due to fossil fuels? Almost certainly not, but that's the reason for Venus being mentioned.
> If the temperature gets high enough, every degree of temperature rise will cause enough evaporation to strengthen the water vapor greenhouse by a degree
This sounds like something fairly easy to model somewhat accurately, are you aware of anywhere that this turning point has been calculated?
Yes, on numerous occasions, all the way back to Ingersoll in 1969 (Leconte et al. 2013, 'Increased insolation threshold for runaway greenhouse processes on Earth-like planets' is the first recent reference I found). It's somewhere in the general vicinity of 60 Celsius.
So yes, there's a reason it's not an immediate concern.
Hmm. I'm skeptical. Looking of the mass of the hydrosphere, we find that if all of it were vapor the surface pressure would be ~260 atm, and a quick glance at the phase diagram of water says the surface temperature would need to be ~500C. Now, water is already a lot more chemically reactive than CO2, and that is before we heat it to exceedingly high temperatures, where it will react with a wide variety of minerals (which would remove it). I'm finding it hard to believe you could maintain a mantle of superhot water without it being pretty quickly removed by reaction with the surface. CO2 is another story, it is a very unreactive compound -- indeed, one of the few things to react effectively with it is water ha ha, and even then it only precipitates as carbonate rock because water *also* reacts vigorously with Group 1A and 2A metals and puts them in the ionized state where they can form precipitates with the carbonate ion.
That's also leaving aside the point that if it were possible to trigger a positive-feedback loop with water vapor by a mere 2-3C rise in temperature above the 20th century average, it would've already happened in the last interglacial or so.
All true and it doesn't change a thing about what I said. It would take millions or billions of years to change our atmosphere to be anything like that of Venus. There's no way that process you described (quite well) happens fast enough to make us Venus in our children's lifetime.
"if you don’t think your kid is going to make the world a better place in some way, why bother?"
I really like this blog. You can go whole articles appreciating the insight into matters great and small and then Scott throws something like this at you, like he just stepped off a saucer from Beta Reticuli. It's bracing, like
It has always seemed weird to me to argue that one should avoid having kids as an act of mercy on them. After all, human life is (unfortunately) still so fragile that a miserable child can easily exercise the option to cease their own existence by suicide.
One might argue that it is still immoral to force them to experience the suffering necessary to motivate them to exercise this option. However, given the relatively small fraction of people who commit suicide in even the worst times and situation in history, it seems we are quite terrible at estimating the amount of suffering people are willing to endure before deciding it isn't worth it and should therefore be very cautious in that calculation.
For example, I believe I read a study once estimating that the suicide rate in a Nazi concentration camp was 25%. That's very high, of course, but that means 75% of people still preferred existence to suicide.
I wouldn't take much meaning from the suicide rate. We have extremely strong instincts against suicide, such that even if people prefer suicide to existence, very few will carry it out.
Perhaps, but I'm inclined to offer two responses. One is that our strong instincts against suicide are based on our strong "instinct" for enjoying existence. So, I feel this objection at least borders on question-begging.
Second, whatever issues there are with inference from "revealed preference", I'd say those issues are far less serious than predicting the actual preferences of a non-existent being.
I agree completely on your second point. To your first point, all you have to do is stand next to the edge of a cliff and feel how uncomfortable that makes you. The discomfort has nothing to do with an instinct of enjoying existence: it is just an instinctual aversion to danger.
"After all, human life is (unfortunately) still so fragile that a miserable child can easily exercise the option to cease their own existence by suicide."
Perhaps you should read that sentence again and think how differently the world would be if it was easy.
You wrote, "The IPCC predicts sea levels will probably rise another half a meter to a meter by 2100".
The linked page says instead, "In its 2019 report, the IPCC projected (chart above) 0.6 to 1.1 meters (1 to 3 feet) of global sea level rise by 2100 (or about 15 millimeters per year) if greenhouse gas emissions remain at high rates (RCP8.5)."
The page THEY link to says instead that RCP8.5 is the most-extreme scenario of RISING emissions, not of emissions continuing as at present.
So the IPCC doesn't predict that sea levels will probably rise another half a meter to a meter. RCP8.5 is an unlikely scenario. The consensus median sea rise by 2100, when I checked about 2 years ago, was about one foot. The only findings since then that I'm aware of would lower that to maybe 8 inches, but that's a guess with high variance, since the findings involved local effects such as the circulation of water underneath ice shelves, rather than global effects.
This is yet another example of climate change claims getting exaggerated with every repetition. All it takes to do that is to let one or two qualifying words slip past which indicate that the result being presented is not the expected result.
I can't help but note that we wouldn't even be talking about this if not for the anti-nuclear campaigns of the 20th century, and that nuclear power is STILL the obvious and only practical solution.
- We would still be having this conversation even if Western nations had gone nuclear, because most of the warming so far is due to burning wood in underdeveloped nations.
- Nuclear energy is the answer for the Western democracies. But I don't yet trust Russia, China, or India to develop safe nuclear power plants.
Russia IS the biggest nuclear power plant builder and exporter in the world right now, and it probably has more competence in this matter than Western democraties, simply because the latter haven't been building much nuclear lately at all. There are Russian-built nuclear reactors in Western democracies too (at least in Finland, where a new nuclear power plant also by Russia is being planned). Russia also still builds and operates e. g. nuclear-powered icebreakers, which no other country in the world does.
My perception is that the nuclear program is still going rather strong in Russia (despite it being a poor country, which probably could spend these money on more useful things) largely for the same reason as the space program: it is an area where the USSR was genuinely successful and now a prominent remnant of the gone "golden age", which helps somewhat to keep the country's prestige internally. Russia of course does not care about climate change, and is also proudly building new coal power plants.
The latest IPCC report finally admitted a bit more clearly that RCP8.5 wasn't a likely outcome. What is often missed is that of course all RCP outcomes start at today's trajectories and then diverge in the following decades. Some rather disingenuous reporting uses that to infer RCP8.5 is the expected outcome if "nothing changes".
Even with RCP8.5 sea level rise had a range whose median outcome was ~2 feet and max was 3 feet. So the media continuously reported the worst case of the range for the worst case RCP trajectory as nominal. A few years ago the NOAA did something called an extreme scenario where ice sheets were assumed to disintegrate and so forth where they got to 2M of sea level rise. This number started showing up in the media on a regular basis. This would require what are pretty stable sea level rise rates to increase 10X, starting tomorrow. It's batty and doesn't even pass a minimal sanity check.
The choice is viewed through a very western lens, with the benefits basically: would I value having kids and a relationship with them? Instead of: do I value having brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, cousins, grandparents, an actual extended family? And if you do value that, then your children aren't just valuable to yourself: they are valuable to others in your family. The extended family cannot exist without more kids.
It is common to hear people complain about their family pressuring them to have kids, with the sentiment that it is none of their business. But you aren't just having kids for yourself: you're having them for the whole family.
Or at least, you would be if you weren't living an extremely independent western lifestyle where families are separated by hundreds or thousands of miles, and increasingly wide generational gaps, and mostly don't interact. As it stands, you aren't helping to bolster an extended family and support network by having kids. You are creating an autonomous worker drone who will struggle to create meaningful relationships in an age of serial monogamy, and find most of their self-worth creating shareholder value and curating their instagram through tasteful consumer choices.
Scott's political argument may be good rhetoric for persuading the particular people he wants to persuade, but it is a bad argument. Nordhaus, arguing for the importance of acting against climate change, estimated the global net cost of doing nothing for fifty years instead of taking the optimal policies immediately as $4.1 trillion. Congress at the moment is considering two pieces of legislation whose combined cost is more than that.
The scale of expenditure considered in one political controversy in one year should make it obvious that the amount at stake in political decisions in the US over the next century is much more than the amount at stake globally, at least according to an expert estimate from someone trying to make the amount look large, on climate policy.
The only defensible sense I can make of the argument is it is of the form:
1. Climate change isn't a catastrophe that should make you choose not to have kids.
2. But if you believe it is, then you should have kids so that there will be more voters trying to stop it.
Re: Slim majorities and the median voter theorem, here's a halfway-rigorous way of thinking about this in the context of political parties:
Imagine an iterated 2-player game where two political parties compete to guide the country in different directions. There is an N-dimensional space of all possible policies the country could enact, and each party has a (different) desired point within that space, and wants to get as close as possible to their goal point.
In each round, each party chooses a platform, which is any point they like within the overall policy-space. Then, all voters support whichever platform is closer to that voter's personal preferences, and the country moves in the direction of that platform.
Parties are incentivized to win the election, but also incentivized to choose platforms closer to their goal point. If you use your true goal point as your platform, you'll lose the election, and won't move. If you just copy voters' popular preferences, it becomes easier to win votes, but you still don't move anywhere. You want to maximize (probability of winning) * (distance towards your goal if you win).
In the perfect-information version of this game, both parties will pick platforms that closely follow popular opinions (the "median" voter, or some N-dimensional analog), because if they don't, then the other party will win by getting closer. You need to take the smallest possible steps towards your goal, because whoever tries to move faster will lose.
But now suppose that parties have only imperfect information about voters, voters' preferences change between rounds. Now, moving faster isn't ALWAYS punished, because your opponent doesn't have enough information to reliably capitalize on your mistake; sometimes you win anyway, and your bolder platform means you get a bigger win than if you'd been cautious.
The more uncertainty, the more the two parties will start to pull apart from each other, as the occasional big wins make up for winning less often.
But if both players are approximately equally good at the game, you still expect them to split the vote pretty close to 50/50. For both players, the ideal outcome is to be just-moderate-enough that you can win 51% of the vote, while making as much progress as possible towards your goal-point.
(Note that "the vote" in question here is whatever is actually used to determine the winner. In US presidential elections, that means I'm predicting they approximately-evenly-split the electoral college, not the popular vote.)
If the voters' preferences suddenly move in one direction, then in the short term, one party will start getting more votes--because both parties were blindsided. But once the parties figure out what happened, we expect both parties to move in the same direction as voters' preferences, until they are once again splitting the vote approximately evenly.
In other words: the majority will ALWAYS be razor-thin. Changes in overall voter preferences will move both parties, instead of changing the margin of victory.
Of course, this conclusion is only as sound as the model it was based on.
This is a great explanation of why elections are always so close.
... though I think it doesn't fundamentally change the conclusion of this article, just the mechanism. Instead of having 5% more "children of climate concerned parents" flipping the election from Republican to Democrat, it just means that, in this model, both the Republicans and Democrats will move more towards caring about the environment, regardless of the outcome of the election.
The conclusion is similar in that changing demographics still cause movement, but it differs in that the movement is gradual, rather than an abrupt turning-point where you flip from one party to another.
(Also, it gets more complicated when you factor in stuff like electoral colleges.)
The way I think about it is even simpler: political parties are playing a game of reverse Blackjack. The goal is to get to 51% of the vote (or equivalent, like Electoral College votes), then spend your remaining 'policy slots' on the policies you yourself actually want, without going beneath 51.
Getting more than 51% is like stopping below 21 in Blackjack: safer than going under 51/over 21, but not as rewarding as getting closer to the magic number: getting 60% of the vote is nice, but not as nice as getting to do what you want, especially since you still get 100% of the Presidency with only 51% of the (Electoral College) votes. Thus, everyone tries to go for 51% (or therabouts), not too much higher or lower.
"One way to think of this is to notice that we’ve already gotten about 25-30% of the global warming we’re likely to see by 2100."
Your graph starts in 1950. Warming starts about 1909. From then to 1950, global temperature goes up by about .29°C. From 1950 to 2019, the last year in the NASA table I'm using, another 1 degree. So your 25-30% should be 32-39%.
Good arguments but you missed what is IMO the strongest one, economic growth.
If global GDP per capita continues to grow at about 2% per year, your grandchildren will be about 4 times richer than you. Climate change could be much more costly than the IPCC says and it would just mean that your grandkids are 3 times richer than you instead of 4 times.
"if you want kids at all you have to believe they’re going to add something to the world, right? Maybe it’ll be as a climate change activist or environmental scientist, maybe it will be in some totally different field, but if you don’t think your kid is going to make the world a better place in some way, why bother?"
I strongly disagree with this sentiment. I do not have children (yet), but if I decide have any in the future, it will not be for their utilitarian value in making the world a better place. That could be a nice bonus, but it would not at all be required. In fact, I suspect that from a pure EA perspective, using my time and energy to make a family will be highly inefficient.
The only thing I would want for my kids is for them to enjoy their lives. As long as they have that, I'll be happy. Even if they turn out to never help another person in any capacity, never get a job, and contribute nothing to anything.
People don't want to have children for personal (not quite altruistic) reasons (basically to party until they're 50 or focus on their career and so on), and put forward the "climate change" BS as a noble justification.
0. I am in qualified agreement with the plea. Climate change, or rather the looming environmental crisis for which it is a shorthand,* should not in itself be a reason for this decision.
My moreal position is that taking the top few steps implied by your "much more than you wanted to know about carbon emissions" post (move to a high-density city, or failing that, next door to work; ride a bicycle, never a car; take no more than ten plane rides in your life; go vegetarian) more than compensates.
However: -
1. This essay amounts to telling women what to do with their lives, and the comments are mostly worse in that regard, as well as in their content because the overwhelming majority of commenters present as male.
2. This essay does not read like one of yours. I expect you to reveal at some point that it was a guest post by a woman.
3. The essay utterly fails to address the moral argument. Morals are not about what other people do: they are not a co-ordination problem. Talk about percentages of voters is utterly irrelevant.
Climate attribution has solidified over the last few years. We know that there will be millions of climate-attributed excess deaths from storms and droughts over the remainder of the century. The question is, to what degree do you want to contribute to them?
4. Focusing on sea level rise is seriously strawmanning climate change concerns.
Economists do that, because they are drunks who can only look for their keys under the streetlight. Not all of them, though: In "Climate Shock", Wagner and Weitzman plead with their fellows to consider the implications of fat-tailed pdfs of climate harm.
Focussing on sea level rise *in developed countries primarily* is strawmanning the strawman. Therefore this section reads like "don't worry your pretty head about it". This essay really *had* better be written by a woman.
5. Unlike moral belief, carbon capture and sequestration technology *does* suffer from a co-ordination problem: it will ony endure and grow if it is mandated by governments.
* William Gibson coined the term "the jackpot" for this multi-system capacity exhaustion and degradation. It's a pity some term like this hasn't taken off.
> 1. This essay amounts to telling women what to do with their lives, and the comments are mostly worse in that regard, as well as in their content because the overwhelming majority of commenters present as male.
This is wrong on multiple accounts. First, and most critically, the whole essay is in answer to someone who's reason for not having children is because of climate change. Everyone coming to the comments to argue that there are other reasons to not have children is missing the point.
Second, the implied idea in your comment seems to be that women are the only ones who have any business over deciding whether to have children, and so any advice regarding whether or not to have children is "telling a woman what to do with their lives". ... despite that having children is a *joint* decision between a couple in the vast majority of cases.
There are absolutely men who are apprehensive about having children in an era of climate change and this article is just as applicable to them as it is to women.
> 2. This essay does not read like one of yours. I expect you to reveal at some point that it was a guest post by a woman.
I have no idea why you think this isn't Scott, or what to make of the fact that you seem to think this essay (which you seem to almost entirely disagree with) must have been secretly written by a woman. ... which seems weirdly sexist in light of your previous complaint.
I'm one of the small-ish number of women subscribers and regular readers here and whatever weaknesses strike me about Scott's argument (have babies so they'll vote Democrat!), I do not hear him telling women what to do with their lives, nor do I hear the commenters at large doing that. I'm interested in where you hear that.
I have an extremely sensitive button around men telling women what to do with their lives, so it surprises me to see someone have that switch flipped without mine also being flipped.
> This essay amounts to telling women what to do with their lives
actually entire point of this essay is arguing that people deciding to have children[1] should ignore one of external voices telling them what to do with their lives
[1]not only women! There are cases where women alone decides about it but it is not dominant at all
Even if the worst case scenario of climate change happens, nature will eventually be fine. Nature survived the great oxidation event, so there's no realistic world in which global warming destroys the biosphere.
So the only possible reason to care about climate change at all is because of how it will affect people in the future. And not having future people exist is a self-defeating way of helping them.
Besides, solving this requires human creativity, effort and wealth. The more of these we have, the more we can spend on climate change. The fewer people we have, the less creativity and wealth we'll have, and the harder it will be to actually make things better. Really the best thing you can do for the planet is have more kids.
This phenomenon is real lesson in unintended consequences. Decades of over-moralizing and catastrophizing about a problem has bred a whole new moral panic about the existence of humans. Given how many people say having kids is the best/most meaningful part of their lives, the net effect of climate activism might turn out to be hugely negative for humanity..
The more people who are bred, the more resources are consumed which makes climate change worse. It is not a guarantee that more people will magically mean more creativity and wealth. After all, in the aftermath of the Black Death, there was mor wealth, at least per capita for the working classses of Europe.
In the middle ages, the vast majority of wealth was in farmland. The basis of the feudal economy was controlling land, and peasants to work the land were (economically) interchangeable. The richest lords were those with the most land. Valuable capital was already there, rather than created. That's why conquest was more profitable than investing.
Today, the economy is based on knowledge. The most valuable companies in the world, implying Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Tencent, etc. get their value from knowledge. Knowledge workers are in short supply. Founders and investors in knowledge companies are the richest people in the world.
Even if you consider capital to be more important than labor in creating wealth, the most productive capital is generally not farmland or mines. It's factories and data centers, which have to be invented and built by creative people.
Real estate is valuable and often a good investment, but it's not productive. It only increases in value because of increased demand and constrained supply. It doesn't create new wealth.
If 1/3 of people died, like the black death, survivors might end up with more real estate wealth, but less new capital would be created. With less new capital and fewer people, we really would lose a lot of economic and creative capability. The world is different today from the middle ages.
> It’s hard to tell how many people have died of climate-change-related causes. Maybe thousands? Maybe tens of thousands?
I get the intent of this post, but really, this is really under-playing it. Just to name one thing: the events ultimately leading to the Syrian civil war involved, among other things, the drought of 2006-2009, which had an unprecedented severity because of anthropogenic climate change:
This does not seem an unreasonably long chain of events to blame a significant percentage of these casualties on climate change; hunger has always been a powerful force for change in societies.
Then we have the geopolitical ramifications of the Syrian civil war and its refugees. Their movements to safety are having long-lasting effects on all of Europe, causing significant debate and strengthening of right-wing parties, parties which just so happen to be on the far side of the climate change denier spectrum.
And that's just one case, one place, a few years: a significant percentage of 350.000 dead, millions displaced.
If you put an almost comically stereotypical focus on the USA, yes, you can buy your way out of much of this. No climate refugees are going to come your way by virtue of geography, sparing you the political ramifications. The world will continue to sell their grain even if their own population may be starving, as long as you offer enough money or technology.
But we're all in this together, and insinuating that the cost of climate change, measured in human lives, is maybe 5 digits, 6 tops, is the sort of disingenious attitude that I'm not used to reading here.
Not sure what you are getting at here. Syria should never have gone to civil war because everything (or at least GDP) was fine and dandy per capita? It was all a big misunderstanding because the peasants failed to understand basic economics? Millions fled the countryside to the cities because of the drought, increasing social tensions, which culminated in the civil war. I guess they should just have eaten their allotted GDP, the silly peasants.
If you are trying to make a point, please do spell it out for me. I sincerely hope I misunderstood you as saying "let them eat cake".
"Millions fled the countryside to the cities because of the drought, increasing social tensions"
I'm doubting that that went through the formality of actually happening, and would like to see more evidence. "The war happened" is just circular reasoning and doesn't count as evidence. It's possible that a fraction of the people got poorer as others got much richer, it's also possible that most got gradually richer over time, as has happened in most countries.
Admittedly, the debate about the link between climate change and conflict is ongoing, in general and Syria in particular, and the number of 1.5 million internal migrants before the war, as can be found in news articles, is most likely overblown, though not totally without basis:
A rather recent study finds and provides a theoretical basis for a connection between "Climatic Stress, Internal Migration, and Syrian Civil War Onset":
> [..] Our findings support the internal migration hypothesis and suggest extreme climate events may impact civil unrest via geographically and temporally indirect paths.
Also, the papers that disagreed with the climate change/internal migration/unrest connection still emphasize the political and socio-economic causes for the civil war, meaning that "GDP per capita was growing before the war" is still without meaning, because people profitted unequally. Assad has attempted China-style economic liberalization, apparently leading to greater economic inequality and thus unrest, on top of the political tensions. Climate change probably has been a contributing factor in an already tense situation, which is what I was getting at in my first comment.
And so my overall point still stands: If climate change is only 1% responsible for the Syrian civil war, then that's already the "thousands" quota thrown in the ring by Scott, and can only get worse from there.
> And so my overall point still stands: If climate change is only 1% responsible for the Syrian civil war, then that's already the "thousands" quota thrown in the ring by Scott, and can only get worse from there.
1% still sounds like an overestimate.
Besides, if we are to accept this extremely tenuous link then we must also offset all the other wars which have been _prevented_ by climate change.
Which wars? I don't know. But if we were able to peep into the universe where everything else is held constant but the effect of anthropogenic climate change is magically removed, then I would contend that the probability that this alternative universe doesn't have a Syrian Civil War is approximately equal to the probability that this universe has an extra war somewhere else.
On what basis? One study I linked found that the sever drought at the time was a contributing factor for the unrest that culminated in the Syrian civil war. Surely they would not make such a statement if they didn't find a sufficiently strong signal in their statistical analysis. And we know that climate change will, among others, result in climate stress such as droughts. It's certainly plausible that we have such a connection here.
So if the drought has contributed a percentage x to the outbreak of the war, and climate change has made the drought more likely by a factor of n, then climate change has contributed x - x/n to the outbreak of the war.
For example, let x equal 10% so that the authors of the study can confidently say that the drought has contributed. Let's further say that climate change increases the chance of drought by a factor of 1.1, or a 10% increase. That would mean climate change has contributed 10 - 10/1.1 ~ 0.9% to the war outcomes.
>then I would contend that the probability that this alternative universe doesn't have a Syrian Civil War is approximately equal to the probability that this universe has an extra war somewhere else.
Guess it's my turn to ask for more evidence. I provided at least some. Can you too?
I'm skeptical of this, both because I think the drought was only a small contributor to the civil war (lots of Arab countries were having protests and civil wars around this time) and because I think climate change was only a partial contributor to the drought (I don't know anything about Middle Eastern droughts, but I've been following the US hurricane research and it looks like climate change has had a vague small gestalt effect that can't clearly be blamed for any individual hurricane).
I suspect that in the next few years, every political disturbance in the Third World will be blamed on climate change - and also, that when you add it up, there won't be any more political disturbances in the Third World than in previous decades (or than the trend from previous decades would have predicted).
If you had to put a number on it, how large would you estimate the effect of climate change on Syria, to pick an example? Is 1% too much? Too little? From the articles I've skimmed here:
the point that the Syrian drought around 2006-2009 was the worst on record is not disputed.
As I am discussing with another commentator, the influence of climactic stress (not necessarily caused by climate change) on conflict in general and Syria in particular is still under debate. I'm not remotely qualified to weigh in, but there certainly are arguments in favor, for example
Surely, if the authors feel sufficiently confident to state in a paper that they have found a signal in the real, messy world of people and economy and politics, it had better be more than 1% above noise. Again, lot of debate around that.
One says two to three times as likely, meaning climate change would be responsible for .5% to .67% of the Syrian civil war and its outcomes:
while a response to that paper finds no connection and shares your view that policy makers, news outlets etc. should be more cautious with such claims:
As you've already said yourself, climate change is going to be very bad for the world, i.e. the bad outcomes will greatly outweigh the good. Somehow this net badness has to manifest itself, for example through weather extremes such as floods or droughts. So if droughts and climate in general can contribute to "political disturbances", and climate changes causes more of those, then surely climate change will be measurably responsible for those outcomes. And again, even small percentages matter when we are talking about millions of refugees and hundreds of thousands dead over a certain time frame.
> I suspect that in the next few years, every political disturbance in the Third World will be blamed on climate change - and also, that when you add it up, there won't be any more political disturbances in the Third World than in previous decades (or than the trend from previous decades would have predicted).
On the very first comment in this thread you called out ramparen on their usage of "no one" in their comment. Is it safe to assume that you hold yourself to the same standard when you say "every" and "won't be any more" political disturbances? In other words, are we going to see a line or two about this in the next yearly predictions post?
How many wars, insurrections, etc, did the climate change we've had so far *prevent*? If you're going to count the Syrian Civil War, even at the 1% level, you have to count those too. And at this level, we are talking about small perturbations that a priori are about as likely to go one way as another.
If climate change is a net negative for the world, then the conflict and general suffering it has prevented surely must count for less than it has caused, or not?
First off, "if", so facts not in evidence. Second, it is possible for climate change to be a net negative and yet cause less conflict. Even less suffering, though that's a bit more of a stretch. Still, if the result of climate change is 10% less suffering, and 30% less joy, that's a net negative.
Is it really still a point of contention that climate change is going to be a net negative? Scott himself seems to believe so ("In conclusion, climate change will probably be very bad for the world"), not to mention the vast majority of climate scientists.
Only Syria, Libya and perhaps Iraq had a civil war from Arab Spring. And Libya was already a desert, with foreign intervention exacerbating that. Iraq was partially an outgrowth of Syria's civil war, alongside the American invasion wrecking the country years before. Syria wasnt subject to those same sorts of things.
There are lots of reasons to not have a child. The main reason is if you really don't want one because it will ruin your lifestyle. In that case, please please do not have a child. But for those people who are concerned about the future, you are exactly the people who SHOULD have children. Because you are concerned about the future you most likely will be a good parent and thus raise a decent and valuable human being that can contribute to the world.
The average American makes over $1 million in their lifetime. Even if your carbon offset estimate is off by an order of magnitude, their value easily covers the carbon. If you care about the world, have kids.
Thanks for writing this. I consider myself to be somewhat in the camp of avoiding children due to climate concerns, but this was never about the issues in the post. I'm concerned about the emotional burden placed upon my children from living in the future world. This in turn has led me to examine the moral implications of bringing children into the world largely against there will. Anyway, these days the reluctance is far more about the uncertain political future and health care future exacerbated by the pandemic, and no longer about climate. This could be read as just making excuses for my behavior, but if my behavior is something I want to be doing anyway, I don't think it matters my excuse. Well, to me it wouldn't but all the pressure from society kind of demands you have these types of excuses at the ready.
The worst possible thing that could happen as a result of runaway global warming is a replay of Earth's worst mass extinction ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian%E2%80%93Triassic_extinction_event ), which happened when the largest known volcanic eruption ever ended up causing, among other problems, the release of trillions of tons of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, which messed up ocean circulation between the surface and the depths, which caused there to be less oxygen and allowed anerobic bacteria to grow that produced toxic hydrogen sulfide gas. Various positive feedbacks then made the oxygen-depleted regions larger and larger until the bacteria were making enough hydrogen sulfide to make the entire atmosphere unbreatheable and to destroy the ozone layer exposing the surface to potentally lethal levels of UV radiation. So, yeah, end-of-the-world type stuff.
Fortunately this kind of disaster would probably require warming the Earth by at least *ten* degrees Celcius, which is significantly more than even the most pessimistic scenarios project and the feedbacks take thousands of years to get to the point where hydrogen sulfide comes out of the ocean and kills everything. So it's not exactly a realistic scenario, but it is *possible* to kill the planet with enough carbon dioxide.
I'm an older (48) reader with two young kids (3.75 and 11 months). I'm extremely pro-natalist, yet my wife and I have already decided that we will likely stop at the 2 since we live in NYC and I'm old. That said, I've heard this exact anti-child sentiment from my 20-something cousins (my mother comes from a family of 8, with her being the oldest, so I have cousins that range from 40's to pre-teens).
Here are my quick takes on why well-off educated people should opt to have families:
1) If you enjoy the fairly liberal, largely secural society you live in, have kids that will be future voters who will help protect that society and its values. If you don't, you will be outbred by religious orthodoxy and you will eventually have a much less tolerant society.
2) Any likely solution to climate change (proactive technological solution, since cutting back is no longer going to do enough to stem the current heating up loop) will originate among the educated elite and their children. I'm decently smart, yet my daughter knows 50x what I knew at 3.75 years. She can basically read, while I learned to read in kindergarten. She understands and can sometimes control her emotions, I had no basic emotional control until post-high school.
3) Having kids and attempting to raise them well has been the most important and most challenging endeavor of my life. I'm not sure I would consider the person I was before having kids to have been fully human. I'm not saying there aren't good reasons for SOME people to not have kids, but the person I was before having kids was 10x more selfish than the person I am now. And I don't have to think about it - innate biology kicks in. I have more energy and purpose than at any other time in my life.
4) Civilization is hard. Civilizations that bequeath gifts of technology, beauty, and progress to humanity are rare and should be celebrated, defended, and cherished. If you are an American, your kids will likely grow up with more wealth and opportunity than humanity has thus far experienced.
Thanks for writing, and taking up a hot topic. I agree with the conclusion, but respectfully disagree with the framing and the justifications.
The thesis statement to me feels both narrow (relegating the vast majority of the world to collateral damage) and incorrect (missing the point):
"Life in the First World will continue, with worse weather and maybe a weaker economy, but more or less the same as always."
I wish I shared that sentiment, but I think you wildly underestimate the relationship between society/politics and climate. Very few people are arguing that climate alone will be the issue. It's not the fact of sea-rise, it's the mass displacement and associated societal pressures (the refugees resulting from one civil war in Syria, at least in part related to natural resource access, practically broke Europe). It's the way the climate crisis interacts with -- and drives -- the other elements of the polycrisis (rising authoritarianism, runaway inequality, racialized violence, etc.)
The people (myself included) weighing the ethics of having children are not worried primarily about the prospects for "my white male son with an American passport, intergenerational wealth, and legacy admissions at an Ivy"... they're worried about "do I want to bring kids into the kind of world where those are the preconditions to anything resembling a decent life?"
The mindset that gives rise to the inquiry in the first place I suspect is tied to a concern with justice, with fairness, with dignity... and not only for our narrowly-defined biological children. The question is one of: what is the best way to live in the world to mitigate the climate crisis, and in that context should I have children? By framing the second question in narrow technical terms, I fear you miss the ethic of care and concern that gives rise to the first.
> they're worried about "do I want to bring kids into the kind of world where those are the preconditions to anything resembling a decent life?"
If you _do_ think that these are going to be the preconditions for having a decent life, then it seems like the most moral thing to do is to maximise the number of people who are born into those conditions.
If we do the Rawl veil of ignorance thing, then if I'm going to be born as a random person in the next generation then by golly I would like to ensure that the number of people born into rich White American families is maximised and the number of people born into poverty in Syria or Nigeria is minimised.
I think the idea is supposed to be that "giving up" having children is supposed to be some kind of "statement" that signals one's ideological opposition to the system that supposedly benefits people like him. It's an easy way to send this signal for people who don't want to have children anyway, much easier than parting with said "generational wealth," after all, it's not like there are any institutions that exist one can donate that money too to support the poorer among us.
The mid range estimate of GDP growth by 2100 is 450%, including developing countries closing the gap and thereby individually growing at a faster rate than the total. There's basically no amount of climate cost that will actually tend to worsen life overall
For instance it is predicted that hurricanes may get somewhat less frequent as the temperature gradient from the arctic to the tropics reduces (negative feedback of clouds in the tropics substantially reduces warming there). However with higher temperatures the hurricanes should be higher energy, resulting in an estimate of a warming caused doubling of hurricane costs
Crucially however, this means that the cost of GDP projection is that rather than drop to a quarter, hurricane costs will drop to half of their current GDP fractional cost as the economy grows. In doing so deaths are likely to decrease absolutely as people with better economies are substantially better prepared to deal with disasters
You seem convinced that there is some kind of "polycrisis". Yet when I look at the factors you cite I see general improving trends.
War is less common now than before, not more common
Incomes are 10x higher globally, and estimated by the IPCC to rising another 4x (thus 40x long term) by centuries end with climate change
Lifespan is double globally.
Freedom, democracy (not authoritarianism), equality of opportunity, education and so on are incomparably better than even a few generations ago.
Global inequality has been declining rapidly over the past generation (this assumes inequality is even problem as opposed to unfairness). Either way the world is getting less unequal and more fair by just about any measure.
Racism and racialized violence are orders of magnitude less severe than a few generations ago. Again, humans have never lived in a time with so little of this human folly.
Could you please explain how the world today is more unjust or how we have less dignity or opportunity or freedom than we did in prior generations? Seriously. When is this golden era to which you compare the problems of today to?
Could you try to enlighten those of us scratching our heads and wondering what you are talking about? I promise to keep an open mind.
My benchmark is a just world, not any point in the past. I think the picture is complicated, at best. I like Tom Atlee's line:
"Things are getting better and better and worse and worse, faster and faster, simultaneously."
I think trend lines are most relevant forward-looking: are we getting closer to a just world, or farther away? While there are certainly some positive trends in limited spheres (global health, perhaps), the macro trends are all moving in the wrong direction (climate, inequality, economic stability, racialized violence, authoritarianism, etc).
It's a long read, but the best overall picture on the macroeconomic context I've found is from Wolfgang Streeck, eerily prescient writing in 2014 (anticipating the rise of Trumps, Johnsons, Bolsonaros, etc). Here's a teaser:
"The capitalist system is at present stricken with at least five worsening disorders for which no cure is at hand: declining growth, oligarchy, starvation of the public sphere, corruption and international anarchy. What is to be expected, on the basis of capitalism’s recent historical record, is a long and painful period of cumulative decay: of intensifying frictions, of fragility and uncertainty, and of a steady succession of ‘normal accidents’—not necessarily but quite possibly on the scale of the global breakdown of the 1930s." (https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii87/articles/wolfgang-streeck-how-will-capitalism-end)
I think he more than adequately supports his arguments with compelling data - if you see it differently, i'm curious. And I think the intervening 7 years has validated his central thesis, and I don't see any serious prospects for change within the status quo (I do, however, hold out hope for transnational social movements anchored in a vision of justice and a world where everyone belongs).
I do agree that some things are getting better, and some things worse, and some of the things that are getting worse are negative side effects of those things we have improved
I already provided a disagreement to your suggestion of some of the trends running in a counter direction. I think anyone who thinks there is more violence, more racism, more poverty, less freedom, more authoritarianism, more war, or less opportunity than in prior generations is very mistaken. Please provide longer range stats if you really believe this though.
I kind of agree with some of the first article, but roll my eyes at the way it is spun as a critique of capitalism, when it is better viewed as a critique of the corruption and decay of Western Liberal institutions in total. I do agree that institutions tend to ossify and decay over time, and this is happening now around us. (A negative trend).
Hickel's article is much worse though. He starts by distorting what the optimists have written, especially by reducing their narrative to an extended argument for Washington Consensus Neoliberalism. Have you or Hickel even read Pinker? In his two books on the subject, capitalism is at most a very minor part of his explanation. Certainly every expert which I have read on the topic agrees that prosperity involves large decentralized markets of specialization and exchange, of some type or another. There have been various versions of this theme though from Finland to China to Singapore.
Hickel then grudgingly shifts to an argument that poverty may have been reduced but not as much as he would have liked in a perfect world. The optimists argument is actually completely in agreement with this summary. The argument isn’t that it is sufficient, so "YAY Capitalism". Their argument is that over the last two hundred years after ten thousand years of zero progress we have finally started to make gains, and the gains are coming at an increasingly fast pace each generation. The explanation is much, much broader than just free markets though, and specifically includes Enlightenment values, science, technology, energy, rule of law, liberal democracy, modern states, and social welfare functions.
The optimists argument then shifts to the rational conclusion that continued imperfect progress requires first acknowledging what has and has not worked, and then carefully building upon that knowledge.
I appreciate the invitation to dialogue; I spend most of my time in communities that already take for granted that we are living through a moment of polycrisis, so it's a helpful reminder to test my assumptions.
At some level we may be in heated agreement, with different baselines, different goals, and different orientations toward the realm of the possible. My baseline is what is informed by what i believe is possible; my sense of trends is informed both by history, but more importantly by direction. The data is quite clear that we are heading in the wrong direction on virtually all macro trends (not with respect to any particular historical benchmark, but with respect to the future in relationship to the present: is it going to be better). My goal is not prosperity; prosperity was always intended to be a means to an end, and whatever virtues its pursuit may have had until now (which I don't think is helpful to debate) it's quite clear that its continued pursuit imperils the planet (we are living through the 6th great -- and first human-caused -- mass extinction).
My goal is wellbeing, or belonging: are we moving closer to or farther from a world where everyone belongs? While there are a number of positive trends (this is where I orient my work), it's clear to me that the trendlines are not positive.
I think both cynicism and optimism are counterproductive; both lead to inaction. I prefer an active hope, a commitment to taking action on the side of justice, in service of the world we long for. Scott gets a wide readership, and the overwhelming discourse in the comments seems to agree with his primary thesis, so it felt important to me to invite people to consider a different perspective. If you genuinely think the status quo is more or less fine... then we have very different perspectives, which i trust will lead us to very different courses of action. I wish i shared your optimism!
I think most of the people who say "climate change" are using that as short-hand to refer to their sense that there are already way too many people, they don't think there should be more people, and they're already dismayed at the current environmental degradation they see with their own eyes around them (plus they don't have a strong, or maybe any, desire for kids).
A LOT of people who don't desire kids really, really like and care about animals. Sometimes more than humans. And they like forests and open space and nature preserves and untouched wild lands and habitat for animals. You are not going to convince them with these mathematical calculations about the potential carbon impact on hypothetical future people because they look around TODAY and are upset at how many people there are already here NOW and how much they're encroaching on animal habitat and creating pollution and cutting down forests and paving over things.
Also, I guess there are some people who just love being in mega-cities around tons of tons of people like ants in a hive, but I don't think that's a majority opinion. A lot of people want space, and don't like crowding.
I live in a state and metro area that has seen rapid population growth. Almost *everyone* here...conservatives, progressives, those with big families, those with no kids...virtually everyone complains CONSTANTLY about there being too many people and wishing people would stop moving here. We don't like the fact that the highways are constantly under construction to add new lanes yet the traffic gets worse and worse every year. We don't like seeing every inch of previous farm land and open space get developed. We don't like that you used to be able to easily escape to the mountains and now you sit and wait for an hour in a massive line of cars and the trails are all loud and crowded. We don't like the crowds everywhere you go and inability to escape them. We don't like the skyrocketing increase in cost of living. People don't like it! And the birth-rate has plunged while in-migration continues unabated from other states. I mean, it's great for my property values, but in many ways quality of life is worse.
Young people look around and see that while they grew up in a house with a yard and knew everyone in their neighborhood, they will likely have to live in an apartment if they stay in the area, and their kids will be lucky to get a tiny crappy apartment, in the crappy part of town. They see the disappearing wild spaces. They see the increased competition for less and less pay-off. And they don't like it and don't want to add to it.
So regardless of your charts and your math, this is an aesthetic and moral preference. I'm guessing the majority of you pro-natalists have some kind of hard-wired preference for growth and expansion and more more more, but I don't think that is the inclination of a majority of people (I also think the vast majority of people who hold that view are male).
The ecological motivation also lies on top of just not wanting kids much. Here's an experiment. Virtually all of the ecological arguments against kids are also applicable to dogs and cats. They eat a lot of meat products and we spend a ton of money and waste a lot of resources on dog food and treats and cat litter and I'm sure there's a big carbon impact. But try telling any of these anti-kid millennials that we should have less dogs, and that less people should have dogs...they won't like that at all. Because a lot of them truly like dogs more than people. Which I know infuriates the pro-natalists. But I don't really know how you can hector people out of a clear preference. And apparently in the evolutionary contest of being an appealing organism that evokes compassion and care-taking in humans, dogs and cats win.
"So regardless of your charts and your math, this is an aesthetic and moral preference."
You can call people who try to block development and then whine there aren't enough houses around holders of different aesthetic and moral preferences. I just call them wrong.
"I'm guessing the majority of you pro-natalists have some kind of hard-wired preference for growth and expansion and more more more, but I don't think that is the inclination of a majority of people (I also think the vast majority of people who hold that view are male)."
I would say most people just adopt the views of the local elite so long as one can hold them without immediate pain. So people won't give up their cars, but will endorse climate change action on an abstract level. The minority who can think for themselves, well, wouldn't want to get the host in trouble...
Who blocks new development and then whines about there not being enough houses? Maybe that happens in SF, where people feel the need to give lip service to the need for more housing to showcase their progressive bona fides, while their actual preference is to maintain their neighborhood the way it is. Around here, people have no compunction about stating their strong preference for no new development, no more people, they like it the way it is now (or was five years ago) and any new people can figure it out somewhere else and build new towns, away from them. A lot of local energy goes into opposing new development and infrastructure, and the equity based appeals to think of the poor people who want to live here and can't afford it don't seem to have much persuasive power.
Good summary. I generally fall into this camp. I care deeply about non-human animals and the preservation of their habitat and resources. We live on a finite planet, with complex interconnected systems. Humans can't just keep expanding ad nauseam without serious tradeoffs. I also admit, I've never had strong feelings toward having kids, so it makes having this position pretty painless, personally.
"Also, I guess there are some people who just love being in mega-cities around tons of tons of people like ants in a hive, but I don't think that's a majority opinion. A lot of people want space, and don't like crowding."
Then why do the majority of people live in big cities, and why do more and more people keep moving into cities?
Your post reads a bit "Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded.”
A majority of people don't live in big cities. A majority of people live in suburbs or "metro areas" but that's not at all the same as actually living in the city (and certainly not a "big city"). And the reason is because that's where the jobs are. As we saw last year, if people could do their work from anywhere, plenty would be happy to move to less dense areas.
"Where the jobs are" seems like a good reason to choose a place to live. If metro areas are not at all the same as cities, then we're probably talking about different things, because most "metro areas" look like what I would call a "city" to me.
Personally, I live in a small town (because that is where my job is) with plenty of access to nature, and I would move to a city/metro area in a heartbeat, if my wife and I could find a job in one.
"I live in a state and metro area that has seen rapid population growth. Almost *everyone* here...conservatives, progressives, those with big families, those with no kids...virtually everyone complains CONSTANTLY about there being too many people and wishing people would stop moving here. We don't like the fact that the highways are constantly under construction to add new lanes yet the traffic gets worse and worse every year. We don't like seeing every inch of previous farm land and open space get developed. We don't like that you used to be able to easily escape to the mountains and now you sit and wait for an hour in a massive line of cars and the trails are all loud and crowded. We don't like the crowds everywhere you go and inability to escape them. We don't like the skyrocketing increase in cost of living. People don't like it! And the birth-rate has plunged while in-migration continues unabated from other states. I mean, it's great for my property values, but in many ways quality of life is worse."
See, you lived in a great place. A place where more people wanted to live. So they kept moving in. Makes it worse for you, but surely it is an improvement over wherever all those other people are coming from. If not, they would stop moving in. So on net, it sounds like more people are better off the more dense wherever you are in gets. I understand that it sucks for the original residents, but what can we do? NIMBY, I guess.
I think I see your point though. That idyllic life that the American middle class enjoyed during the second half of the 20th century must be hard to give up. Had I been part of that, maybe I would be against "growth and expansion" too. But coming from a poor country, my best chance at anything anywhere that was immigrating and ruining it for you and your descendants. Sorry.
Sorry for the triple post, but might there be something there?
Americans feel existential dread because, in many ways, the world they grew up in, their way of life, has considerably changed. Republicans blame it on immigrants/atheism/social justice while democrats blame it on capitalism/the carbon economy/republicans or something like that.
Sure, I don't at all blame or fault immigrants (whether from other states or countries) for wanting to move here...I wanted to move here too, it's a gorgeous area with a great blend of city amenities and outdoor recreation access. But at a certain tipping point of population, many of the charms will be ruined (or at least made less charming). My sense is that this is not really as much of a conservative/progressive thing as people make it out, as everyone wants to preserve what is nice about what they already have, and wants things to also be nicer for other people, but only to the extent that there's no skin off their own back. They just talk about it differently, as you pointed out, with conservatives being more blunt and less concerned with hurting feelings and progressives operating from the standpoint that people can be or or should be more altruistic than they actually are.
But where I live, it is very politically mixed with as many Trump people as Bernie people, and like I said, *everyone* complains about it getting too crowded and there being too much traffic and formerly peaceful recreation areas now being loud and crowded.
I'm someone who cares a lot about animals. I have my own pets, who live a life of extreme comfort and luxury. I also donate a lot to animal charities. What I *don't* do, which I could, is open my own home and let 30 more stray animals live here, because even though it would make those 30 animals lives much better, it would make the existing human, canine, and feline residents of my house lives worse.
The distinction in my mind between living in a "city" versus a metro area is that in a city you have to live in a multi-dwelling unit, whether that's a tall apartment tower or a four-unit brownstone, while metro areas generally encompass the surrounding areas that are single-family residences on their own plot of land. I technically live in a city by my address and voting district, but in reality I'm a 20 minute drive from downtown and live in an area with miles of single-family homes. To me, that's suburbs, while as a technical/legal matter it gets characterized as metro.
I don't disagree with anything you said, and obviously it's a desirable area and I certainly don't fault anyone who wants to move here (I moved here myself from a different state 20 years ago). I'm just pointing out that if we're talking about what the majority preference is, that seems to be living NEAR a city but still on a single-family plot and with lots of access to forest/wildlands. That is achievable with low/no population growth (or population shrinkage), and it is not with population growth, which requires more people living densely.
Yeah, people just get *weird* about global warming.
Yes, it's real. Yes, it's bad. But it's malaria-scale bad, not Cthulhu-is-eating-all-of-humanity-scale bad. We deal with worse all the time. It's worth some effort to mitigate, but you don't need to derange your whole life or society over it.
You raise the issue about what will happen politically if many people who accept climate change as real decide not to have children as a result, while those people who reject it have lots of kids. I think this raises a broader point – if you compare secular socially liberal people with social and religious conservatives, one can observe a big difference in rates of reproduction: on average, the social and religious conservatives have bigger families and start younger, and the difference is even more stark at the extreme/radical ends of religious conservatism (groups such as Latin Mass Catholics, the Amish, Haredi Jews). In the long-run, doesn't this risk resulting in social/religious conservatism making a "comeback" due to outbreeding the secular social liberals? Of course, the counter-argument is that many of today's secular social liberals themselves are defectors from religious conservative upbringings, defections will continue in future generations, and those defections will counteract the religious conservative advantage in births. I think the big issue here is we can't predict what those rates of defection are going to be in the future – it is possible it may not be high enough to prevent a future in which religious conservatives become the demographic majority, and then use their demographic majority to gain political control of society, assuming society retains a democratic system – a turn away from democracy may be one way for secular liberals to retain control even in the face of a growing religious conservative demographic majority, but I think many secular liberals would view that as compromising their own liberalism. I think, religious and conservative groups vary widely in their strategies for retaining their members (especially their young people) and the success of those strategies. However, simply through natural selection, the groups with the most successful anti-defection strategies are going to have greater success, and their strategies may then be copied (consciously or unconsciously) by other groups – so it is possible that defection rates may decline over time, which would increase the likelihood of a future in which religious conservatives have significantly more control over society than at present.
As more information has become more available to more people, each generation is less religious than the last. With the internet, this trend has spiked dramatically. People are not going back to being religious, which has always depended on shielding people from outside information and perspectives.
I live in an area that was EXTREMELY religious just 30 years ago, and had big families. The current 20 and 30-somethings are dropping out of the religion in droves and having much smaller families, and are much more progressive. Once the boomers die out, this solidly red state will almost certainly flip blue. So I don't think Scott's argument on this point holds much water.
You are right, there has (in many places) a big shift away from religious conservatism over the last few decades. However, religious conservatives still exist today, and the ones who still exist today may be rather different from the ones who dropped out and fell away over the last few decades. Those who remain may have much better "memetic immunity" to the information of which you speak. It is no longer new, their leaders openly reject it rather than try to hide it, they've built up a body of counterarguments and counter-narratives in which they inculturate their members. Not all religious conservatives are equal – some were always more likely to defect than others, and I think the secular mainstream has picked off much of the "easy pickings" and many of those who still remain may be much harder to shift, and may even pass on that immovability to the greater number of their children (some of whom will still defect anyway, but long-term demographic victory does not require defections to be kept to zero, only kept below a certain level). New technologies bring new possibilities of access to information, but also new possibilities of control over information – many Haredi Jews now have "Kosher Internet" apps installed on their phones and computers, apps which block access to opinions of which their Rabbis disapprove, and in some cases even allow religious leaders to monitor the online activities of their members and respond proactively to those who appear to be at greatest risk of defection. And, if you look at the amount of far-right, QAnon, pro-Trump, climate-denying, "COVID is a hoax and vaccines are deadly poisons", Islamist, etc, information being spread on today's Internet, is it really true that free access to information guarantees the spread of secular liberalism? The technology itself just transmits data, it is neutral as to whether that data is information or misinformation, true or false, rational or irrational. So, there is no guarantee the current shift away from religious conservatism will continue indefinitely, and it is unlikely to continue to the point that religious conservatives die out – on the contrary, I think religious conservatism will reach its nadir (probably not quite there yet), and afterwards is very likely to undergo a rebound of new growth. The biggest question is how far that rebound will go.
"I live in an area that was EXTREMELY religious just 30 years ago, and had big families. The current 20 and 30-somethings are dropping out of the religion in droves and having much smaller families, and are much more progressive. Once the boomers die out, this solidly red state will almost certainly flip blue. "
Is that because the younger people deeply rooted in that state are flipping, or because Democrats from out of state are moving in?
It's both. We have a massive influx of tech companies and educated, cosmopolitan, secularists moving in, but the under 40 native demographic is also much less religious and conservative. Of course, those young people don't vote in anywhere near the same numbers as the over 55s, so I don't expect the state to flip until the older generation actually starts dying. Probably at least a decade away. But from what I can tell, all of the western states (ID, NV, UT, AZ) are on the same course as Colorado, both with in-immigration and change among the young generation (note it was the western states that went for Bernie in the 2016 and/or 2020 primaries). My guess is the western states become a solid blue voting block by 2040.
I disagree about the death of religion, but only because I use the word "religion" differently. When taken to mean something like "belief in a god or gods", it's a distinction irrelevant to all the ways people use it. People certainly /think/ that religion is relevant to morality, yet "religion" taken as belief in or worship of gods or spirits has usually had little relation to morality. Throughout much of history, and much of the world, religion was and is practical and transactional, and devoid of morality. Nor do most religions "provide meaning" to people. That's the business of the bookish, philosophical, Axial Age religions and their descendants.
What seems to me more important is to have a word to name the category of ideologies that give people absolute (bogus) certainty and make them unable to change their minds or see other points of view; that inspire them to fanaticism and violence; that take over their lives to the point where all their thought and action is centered around that ideology; that give them a moral perspective and rulebook. This category does not include Sumerian, Greek, or Roman religion, and I think also excludes many ancient Polynesian, Central American, and African religions although I can't give as much support for this claim. It definitely includes Platonism, Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, Marxism, progressivism, Nazism, and the social justice movement; probably Romanticism and modern art; and perhaps European football and a few other sports.
This isn't idle speculation; the path from Platonism, to Christianity, to Hegel, is clear; as is its split after Hegel into left Hegelians (from whom we get Marxism and "the left", which are not liberalism), right Hegelianism (from whom we get Nazism and "the right", which are not conservativism); and unitarian universalism (from which we get progressivism and the social justice movement).
So I say we're in the middle of yet another religious "Great Awakening". The absence of a designated anthropomorphic God makes not one whit of difference. Nor will these secular religions behave any more reasonably than the old goddish ones.
I do think temperament is a "cause" of fanaticism. But I think it is now again possible to live without ideology, or with less ideology. As an example, I'll try to distinguish between ideological and less-ideological approaches to a single topic: diversity and freedom of thought.
John Stuart Mill represents an anti-ideological approach, which is based more on pragmatism than on morality: It's sometimes necessary for society to endorse an official opinion on a matter of fact, in order to enable progress from worse to better organizations of society. But it's still important to let people disagree with society's opinion, because society can never be sure it has the matter figured out correctly.
People of many different belief systems could use Mill's argument; yet people with ideologies, which almost as a matter of definition exclude from consideration the possibility that they're wrong, could not.
Multiculturalism represents an ideological approach to the same question. How can you conceive of diversity and toleration if you believe you already hold certain truth? It seems to me that the only way is to partition social beliefs into ones you consider matters of fact, on which disagreement will NOT be allowed; and ones you consider matters of opinion or preference, on which disagreement is allowed. (This is an ancient distinction made by Socrates in Xenophon's /Memorabilia/.)
This is what multi-culturalism does: it posits its own culture's ideological beliefs as culture-independent "truth", and leaves to "culture" only "matters of opinion" such as style of dress, manner of speech, art, and cuisine. Beliefs which affect behavior--say, religious beliefs--must be categorized as one or the other: Either the belief is declared to be a culture-neutral absolute truth; or it is declared to be an evil error; or its affect on behavior is denied.
In order to conceal the fact that one is slicing up cultures in this way, it may be further necessary to make a truth / error / opinion categorization about entire cultures; and this is again what our multi-culturalism has done, taking its own Ivy League culture as truth; allowing Islam, Buddhism, and all other non-threatening ideologies and cultures as mere opinions or conventions; and condemning all competing cultures on its home territory wholesale as error.
Well yes, I agree there are certainly substitute fervently believed and enforced moral codes that don't rely on a supernatural God. I was talking strictly about the ones based on ancient texts and an anthropomorphic god and afterlife.
"Nor will these secular religions behave any more reasonably than the old goddish ones."
I think you answered your question with the term secular religion. I think the west was built in part on the value of separating the state from religion. But with the transition to secular religions, this separation has collapsed. I believe the secular moral ideologies are going to butt heads, with those not subscribing to the progressive mantra thrown out of all respectable civic institutions. And when I mention this to progressives, half of them dismiss it, and the other half clap their hands in glee.
On a scale of threats to humanity, I worry a whole lot more about the friction between secular ideologies than I do about global warming. Indeed, AGW is one such battle line on the (so-far) Cold War.
In my sample, I definitely think that among my extended group there are people convinced that having kids is at best neutral and do not feel encouraged by our culture to have kids, sometimes outgroup gets blamed for their fear over having children. But I am afraid there are a lot of subtle and not so subtle cues throughout our society which indicate a low value placed on creating a bigger and better next generation.
I mean the R/K selection thing applies.If you're making a bigger generation, it probably isnt a better generation as you naturally have less resources and attention to spend on each individual child. It likely makes more sense to focus on say the gifted children or the oldest son/daughter or something like that as is what historically happened.
Setting climate change aside, I'm curious whether it's better for the world to (i) donate $x to effective altruism causes where $x is the cost of raising a child in the first world (including the monetary equivalent of time costs, etc.), or (ii) raise a child, say if the potential parent is a typical ACX reader.
The problem with climate change is it increases the tail risks of catastrophe right? Massive feedback loops or the political impacts of drought/fires/floods etc. the impacts are also non-linear so saying we have felt 25 % of the impact is inaccurate. All the coral reefs will die at 2 degrees. There will be many more step changes like that, which we haven't started to really feel yet.
The effect of CO2 is also non-linear, in that it is logarithmic. Double CO2 from pre-Industrial and you get a direct effect of 1 degree, which you then have to double again to get another degree. It sounds like there is strong agreement that the Transient Climate Response is 1.2 degrees of immediate effect with additive factors while the IPCC's estimate for Equilibrium Sensitivity seems to be in the range of 3 degrees, coming into full effect at an unknown point for instance as transfer of heat into the oceans may not find its way back into surface temperatures for centuries
This is believed to be the cause of an unexpected 20 year pause where there was no statistically significant surface warming with the starting point of the hot 1998 El Nino. The temperature did not hit a statistically significant rise until another hot El Nino at which point the temperature trend either had or was near breaking below the 95% confidence interval of warming projections
Great question. Does anyone have the answer? My guess is that it was some combo of them gradually shifting away from the equator by a few hundred miles, and the coral adapting to be hardier at higher temperatures.
The essay was good and needed, but saying that 3 meters of sea-level rise by 2200 is a worst-case scenario is just wrong. We don't really know how fast ice sheets disintegrate; Greenland and West Antarctica fully collapsing would be 12 meters in addition to thermal expansion and glacier melt, and that's not implausible in 200 years. A runaway greenhouse effect like on Venus is also a real existential risk. It's not a linear system.
The thing is more that, as I said, 200 years is a long time, and IMO the bigger existential risk from climate change remains the threat that the slightly worsened political instability slightly raises the chance of nuclear war. We've got a lot of other problems, even over shorter time horizons, and anyhow we have more ideas for geoengineering our way out of global warming than for averting AGI risk, ending poverty, etc..
> A runaway greenhouse effect like on Venus is also a real existential risk
No it is not. Burning all coal (including lignite and other low grade coal), releasing all organics locked in permafrost and wetlands, burning all carbohydrates and so one would not be not enough.
Human-caused Venus-like situation due to burning fossil fuels is not a real concern.
"The thing is more that, as I said, 200 years is a long time, and IMO the bigger existential risk from climate change remains the threat that the slightly worsened political instability slightly raises the chance of nuclear war."
If the existential risk is A, then resources should go directly towards mitigating A, not towards mitigating B, which might have a small effect on A.
As someone who leans antinatalist, I have a different interpretation of the widespread concern that having kids might be unethical on a warming planet: the belief that human life just isn't very good is very common. As Scott points out, the problems that will be caused by climate change aren't extraordinary ones in the grand scheme of human experience. But they're enjoying to convince millions that life might not be worth living. These people fundamentally agree with the basic case for antinatalism on the grounds of reducing human suffering, even if they would bristle at being described that way. And I'm willing to bite the bullets Scott proffers in this post - the preponderance of horrific suffering in our past, present, and anticipated future are precisely why I'm an antinatalist.
If you poll people and ask them if they feel like they live shitty lives, what percentage of people do you think would say they do?
If I don't feel my life is shitty in the least and I don't consider myself to be the luckiest among us, would you still count my life as shitty because you are applying some standards other than my own?
What evidence would you use to show that someone is deluded about their own subjective contentment, that they are in the midst of an optimism bias, and what their lives "actually are"? How would you make the case that your assessment of things is any more accurate?
It seems perfectly understandable to me that a person would feel like their own life is shitty and that they feel subjectively that the world around them is shitty. But it strikes me as a kind of typical mind fallacy to assert that anyone who feels differently from you about their own life and their view of the world is in the grips of a delusion.
Re. "Remember, most presidential elections are very close. So even though 5% fewer kids will only decrease carbon emissions by 1-2%, it will decrease Democrats’ chance of winning elections by a lot more.":
It seems more likely to me that our two modern political parties, with their polls, social-media-spiders, computers, and marketing experts, each continually try to adjust their positions as far away from each other as they can get and still win 51% of the vote. Any demographic advantage will be spent on endorsing a more extreme platform.
Wait I skimmed this article and it doesn't address the strongest environmental (and other cause areas, up to and including pronatalism) argument for not having children: the same resources can be better used elsewhere.
It would be pretty surprising to me if on the margin the most cost-effective intervention to combat climate change is by having children, for either the majority of my social circle or the majority of readers of this blog.
I'd guess that for most people who think about this sort of thing, the counterfactual isn't "I'll donate the money I save by not having children to Cause X", but instead something mostly X-neutral, like early retirement.
Though I agree that this falls apart on closer inspection, at least if we're looking from a broadly consequentialist perspective.
I see a lot of Americans in the comments saying that lower birth rates are a problem because of the tax base / productive population shrinking over time. I really don't see any reason to worry about this if you're in the US. There are innumerable young, productive immigrants desperately wanting to get into this country but kept out by the law - and I'm not talking about refugees but educated workers with degrees who are held back by H1B/green card quotas etc. As a person who only recently got a visa to the US through such a quota, I do't believe this will change in our lifetime. If people in the US have fewer children, they can just open the gates a bit wider, and the population will be fine.
I actually deeply disagree with this (and the comment below) from personal experience. I can't imagine I'd be of much use to my country if I were still stuck there, limited and miserable. Also true for many people I know. People at their full potential can give back more, even from a distance, than people trapped and stuck in a rut.
(I'm also annoyed and upset by the notion that it's somehow wrong to allow people like me to live where we want on the basis of what's best for a country we didn't choose to be born in, but that's a side topic)
You'll have to provide incentives for people to stay in those areas, like say the state doing policies to maintain industrial capacity in those areas. Improved city development.city upgrades would work well also, and general public transportation.
The United States could fund those countries in exchange or engage in cultural exchange programs or literally annex them (if they're small countries in the Western Hemisphere or literally next to the US, like Mexico).
Definitely not *everywhere*. Plenty of countries are seeing growth, even if it's slightly-lower-than-past-years growth.
I also think that wouldn't contradict my point. The US is one of the most desirable destinations for immigrants. As long as it's willing to open the gates, it'll be among the very last countries to suffer.
Yeah I was sloppy. I think what I meant to say is that the population growth rate is declining everywhere, not that populations everywhere are declining! My ad!
"As long as it's willing to open the gates, it'll be among the very last countries to suffer."
Sure but what matters is global utility, not US utility. Declining populations is probably bad because it means decreased endogenous innovation, etc, though I'm not confident.
But as he just said, a lot of immigration is HB1s and skilled workers. There are several immigrant groups in the US that are far more successful, on average, than the native population here.
While the United States can absorb a significant amount of immigrants and has in the past, there is probably an upper level of immigration that the U.S. can take and stay politically contiguous. At the highest level, around 14 percentage was foreign born. Argentina for a period of time had it at 50% foreign-born. Both countries took immigrants from culturally similar countries mainly (Argentina with lots of Italians, French etc the United States with lots of Germans, Swedes, etc).
Determining which immigrants you absorb is probably a good idea. The United States would probably do better with less cultural clash from absorbing lots of people from the countries south of it, as well as East Asian countries as opposed, to wahhabist Islamist states or something bue to relative cultural similarities.
I do suspect the US does have a higher practical tolerance for immigration then theorized, but there are still political restrictions and your government will have to come up with programs to get your existing citizens to calm down at all the migrants, i.e. mentioning they're humans like you and want a better life etc.
I haven't read every comment, but this is the most polite, civil, thoughtful online discussion of climate change I have seen. This gives me great hope.
Your response to the first line of argument is good. As far as the second one, I'd just like to add that utilitarianism is bad and you shouldn't let your decision as to whether or not to reproduce hinge on the calculation of whether this is on net beneficial for the remainder of the planet.
Apologies if someone has already written this, I haven't had time to read through all the replies.
I really like this post and strongly agree, but I think you may have missed the point that's most important in my mind. If we're going to beat global climate change, we're going to need a strong economy to fund research and development into new technologies (renewables, carbon capture, etc.). Having an aging population that isn't replacing itself is really bad for economic growth (not just total growth, but growth per capita) and having a larger population makes returns on R&D a lot more attractive, since the fixed cost can be be recouped more easily when you have more potential customers.
In America, for instance, we're going to need close to a fixed amount of younger people to take care of our generation when we're older and we're going to have something close to a fixed amount of government debt that will need to be serviced each year from the taxpayers. If we have 200mm working age adults in the next generation instead of 150mm, that burden is spread a lot more thinly, and a greater percentage of society can devote itself to novel R&D. Almost throughout the developed world birth rates are declining, and economists are pretty consistent in considering this a major macroeconomic issue.
We can't shrink our way to net zero emissions. Shrinking our population can only marginally improve carbon emissions, but that won't be enough. If anything, shrinking will hurt the economy, and when the economy is struggling people tend not to care about anything else, especially measures that won't have an impact for decades. The best way to get to net zero fastest is, ironically, to grow ourselves there, providing a strong economy, but balancing it with good policy that makes sure that a large enough percentage of our economy is dedicated to improving the climate.
Having a smaller population languishing for generations with minimal technological progress will cause a lot more emissions in the long run than having a larger population that can fix these issues (as well as whatever other issues that may arise) generations earlier.
I really support people having children even in the face of the climate crisis.
However, I think the strongest argument that I have heard so far is that children are just a high opportunity cost and the money and time spent on them should go into activism, since we are at a decisive moment for how bad it will be. Is there a counter to this argument?
In his 1967 book The Sense of an Ending, the literary critic Frank Kermode argued that human beings try to give significance to our short lives in the long sweep of history by placing ourselves in the middle of a narrative arc. That arc typically traces civilization's fall from a golden age through a current stage of decadence to an impending apocalypse—one that may, through the bold efforts of the current generation, usher in a new age.
"The great majority of interpretations of Apocalypse assume that the End is pretty near," observed Kermode. But since the end never arrives, "the historical allegory is always having to be revised….And this is important. Apocalypse can be disconfirmed without being discredited. This is part of its extraordinary resilience."
The dire prophecies of the first Earth Day have been mostly proven wrong, but the prophets of an always-impending environmental apocalypse have not thereby been discredited. Auguries of imminent catastrophe remain resilient, even as the world of 2020 is in a much happier state than the Catastrophists of 1970 ever expected.
Ok, that is a good point, but that doesn't completely refute the argument.
For every decade so far I would still want people to spend more time on activism to get rid of catastrophic threats. Even now that I now that there was no nuclear annihilation during the cold war I would still urge people in the past to be more active against this threat, since the threat is still real.
I would expect people 100 years from now to still advise us to spend more energy on mitigating climate change, even if it isn't such a civilisation ending threat, since there is still a risk and a potential pay-off transitioning sooner.
One counter is that you might be wrong, your activism might be making things worse rather than better. One of the weird things about the world is how, on a variety of issues, about half the people think it is important to do X, about half think it is important to not do X, and almost all are sure they are right.
For a real-world example, one of the biggest things activists got the U.S. to do was biofuels. That apparently, as Al Gore himself has conceded, has no net effect on CO2 output. It does, however, convert something like ten percent of global production of Maize into alcohol, pushing up the price of maize and doing our bit to contribute to world hunger.
So the counter is that enthusiastic would-be activists, for any cause, should give significant weight to the possibility that their cause makes the world worse, not better. Having a child and doing a good job of bringing the child up, in contrast, has directly observed positive consequences.
>having a kid will create 60 tons of carbon a year
Or 1 ton
Neither, unless someone has invented nuclear fusion all the way up to the point of creating carbon. Say carbon dioxide if you mean carbon dioxide. There's so much bad science (on both sides of the argument) without adding to it with sloppy language.
I'm your intended audience, but I don't find your arguments (or those of other proponents in the threads) compelling.
First, I'll just say, I don't want kids first and foremost for personal lifestyle reasons and I have no issues saying that to people around me - so climate change doesn't alter my decision, but it certainly reinforces it and if others are convinced not to have kids for climate change reasons, then that's a good thing.
The central question is one of how one spends one's time. Kids take a tremendous investment of time, energy and money that can go elsewhere. The easiest thought experiment is maybe just to compare the tradeoffs between adopting a child vs having ones own. While adoption comes with greater costs and there's some complexity around moral hazard in how adoptions are done, the needs of parentless children are tremendous and adopting has zero impact on the climate while having a child has adds a net new developed-world human amount of carbon/pollution. Whatever the true number is of carbon impact of another child, we as individual humans have very little impact on the planet with anything we do and adding another human is actually hugely impactful (and I'd argue damaging) compared to all of our other activities. A developed-world human could choose to double the amount the fly every year, stop recycling, eat endless beef and do every environmentally damaging thing imaginable in their lifetimes and they'd still not contribute to climate change as much as their offspring and descendents.
This is where others would argue that offspring/descendents bring social benefits. You mentioned voting - but that's one vote, roughly 50-60% chance starting two decades down the line. I would wager that any person, given the amount of time/money it takes to raise a child, could change more than 1 vote and in less than 5 years. That's way more political impact much faster. Others bring up that children have economic impact - but how is have more workers in the economy or greater GDP a net good? We could also just have less consumers and then we'd require less economic activity to support them. More GDP is not better. More GDP per Capita is better.
Then there's the whole utility argument that people should just have kids because "that's the meaning of life" or it makes you a better person etc. That may be true but I think unpacking the philosophy here is important. My notion of "family" extends beyond my genetic lineage - my loyalty is to the human family. I don't care if my personal genes survive if instead it means that the human genome, the mammalian genome, or the earth-DNA survives. I think humans would be far better off if more of us thought like ants and bees - we don't all need to have offspring to survive and in fact we increase our collective probability of survival if less of us have offspring and instead take the energy and resources of personal child-rearing and put it into proxies of collective child-rearing.
> I'm your intended audience (...) First, I'll just say, I don't want kids first and foremost for personal lifestyle reasons
This article seems to be directed at other group, it is not some "hello everyone, go breed immediately" but "Please Don't Give Up On Having Kids Because Of Climate Change"
True - I guess I should've qualified this by saying that even if the personal lifestyle reasons went away, the climate change factors would still be barriers - and the climate change factors do constitute talking points I make to people on the fence ahead of personal lifestyle arguments.
I think the concern with runaway loops is valid, just not regarding the runaway greenhouse effect.
As climate disasters get more frequent, if systems are repeatedly unable to contain or recover from the damage or as existing institutional issues get exposed and exacerbated, that would also reduce our ability and willingness to come together to make sweeping change possible.
Models of the impact of 'climate change' by 2050 can't model for these in any meaningful way though.
Coincidentally, the people who are most likely to have the self-control to elect to not have the children in the first place are likely to be the ones whose children will disproportionately be able to address carbon emissions. We need more smart people and fewer stupid people to fix the worlds' problems. But the smart people seem to be the ones who are most likely to change their child-having habits.
I think the argument in section II is flawed, and not because of the median voter theorem.
It assumes children inherit parents' political positions. I mean, this is true, in the bird-eye statistical view, but I believe the argument requires causation, and not merely correlation. I.e., it holds if and only if parents can reliably influence their children's politics. If instead person's politics is, say, downstream from their station in life, then descendants of educated liberals will of course mostly continue being educated liberals, but having no descendants will not necessarily create less educated liberals. It might just as well free the space for some working class kids to go to college, get a job for the credentialed, join educated liberals and start voting like an educated liberal, which may just as well tilt the scales towards Democrats on net.
Personally, I believe we need more people, not less. But specifically, we need to maximize the population capable of contributing to civilizational progress. That's currently limited not by the total number of people, but by inequality that pushes most of them away from the frontier of progress. Given the above, I'm not particularly bothered by rich liberals refusing to have a child.
The article is built on false premises. The truth is that people don't give a shit about the future of the planet as long as they believe that they're gonna be fine, and thus moral arguments like "people don't want children because they don't want to contribute to more pollution" are just as relevant for describing people's behaviour as "don't buy so much avocado toast" is towards achieving financial prosperity. People didn't care for the future by allowing this crisis to unravel. Why do you think they would suddenly care now, when there is so little to gain compared to the past?
Nowadays there is no economic incentive to have kids. In earlier times, having children was sane economic policy: they worked the fields from an younger age and maybe they took care of you when you were broken by that hard work. Nowadays, it's the opposite: children drain the economic resources of the family and require a large investment in their future education, which is usually in the form of debt. Living with high rent, student debt, stagnant and low salaries, facing high medical costs, high educational costs - where does a child factors in?
Climate change just adds to this insecurity towards the future. The mass destruction of the natural world simply resonates with people's general feeling that things are not getting better for them. The fact that our governments seem totally incompetent in tackling the climate crisis doesn't help at all. Not fixing that with "please have children", but we can pretend we tried.
And most people simply don't see any way out of their relative destitution, despite working multiple jobs and trying their best. This is a form of depression and acceptance of helplessness: there are no visible ways for people to hope for an improvement of their situation. The current socio-economic arrangements look "final" - in stark contrast with the situation in the former Communist countries, who at least had the hope that there is something better out there.
There is also no social incentive, there is no family name to "preserve", no clan to be empowered, no legacy to hand down to the future generations, no accomplishments to be proud of. We live in an increasingly anonymous world, where nobody gives a crap about your accomplishments, and some might even feel oppressed by them. If you're not rich, you're one of the anonymous many, except if you live in some alternate social group, where social capital might be different.
The article builds upon a "is not that bad" argument, and yes, nobody knows exactly, but those who know most about the effects of climate change, the climate scientists, are the most depressed ones. Even if the "facts" are correct, which probably they're not, you don't argue back with facts when people fear something. You don't seem to understand what people actually fear and what kind of forces shape their behaviour not to have children.
"children ... require a large investment in their future education"
There's no law that says that you need to save up money to send your kid to college. If you have student debt then your parents didn't do it, or didn't do enough of it, so why should you? Around 40% of kids are born to mothers who aren't even married. Sometimes these are unplanned pregnancies, other times the woman purposefully gets pregnant because "I want a baby" and she can't find a man or rejects all potential men. If you point out the fact that the father won't be in the picture and she only has a McJob, she'll reply with something like "the Lord will provide."* Wich often means the government and their families. She and the guy who's knocking her up aren't even thinking of a college fund.
If people aren't having kids because they can't afford a college fund, they're basically helping to select out of the gene pool the trait to actually care about the child's future. It's myopic and self-defeating to the extreme.
*These women aren't really religious, they don't go to church and certainly don't listen to any of the sexual morality lectures, but they absorb the ideas from American "high prole" culture which is religious.
Similar to this argument, made more than 200 years ago by Malthus on how poor peoples' unfortunate choices to have kids are a form of natural selection that we shouldn't interfere with:
“To the punishment, therefore, of nature he should be left, the punishment of severe want. He has erred in the face of a most clear and precise warning, and can have no just reason to complain of any person but himself when he feels the consequence of his error."
Maybe the belief that humanity is in negative-sum or positive-sum situation may have more important consequences than the desire for kids. First let's define positive and negative-sum states: We are in negative-sum state if one average additional human add less to the global resources (all resources, not only natural ones. Things or services that are consumed so needs to be allocated) than the current average resource share. Conversely, if we are in a positive state, on average one more human will produce more resources than the average consumption.
If we are in positive-sum, having more kids seems perfectly compatible with a effective altruistic worldview. And from a selfish point of view, high natality is something desirable on average (even if you can discuss particular cases where it may not be so, by default it should be welcomed).
I think Scott main point was to try to reconcile negative-sum state, an effective altruistic worldview and the desire for kids.
But I think another aspect is how the belief in positive or negative state influence global politics. If positive, it's logical to consider all strangers as friends by default and I see a broad collaboration as natural. It's Pinker better angels...In a negative-sum....not so much, it's global conflict, distrust of unknown groups (all the worse if they have high natality), collaboration absent at the global level and only maintained at the local level where reciprocity can be checked or enforced, and a reduced level of freedom and equality as elites becomes affraid of the masses ....quite unstable and nasty times.
Now I think it's quite difficult to assess if we are in a positive or negative sum state....but maybe if the relation between global violence/trust and the global resource status (positive or negative sum) is true, maybe it can be reversed and a measure of "global violence" à la Pinker is in fact a good indication about the type of resource-sum world we live in...
The problem with your definition is that it implicitly assumes an even distribution of resources, so that the new person gets his per capita share. A baby is not born clutching a deed to his per capita share of the Earth's land. If he wants land, at least in a market society, either he or someone else, probably his parents, has to buy it from someone else, which doesn't leave the someone else worse off.
The right question is whether the birth of an additional person produces net costs or net benefits to people other than his parents, who presumably would not have had a child if they did not believe having one was a net benefit for them. That's the question I tried to answer in my old piece for the Population Council.
Putting it in the international context, suppose an additional person is born in India. Further suppose that his net effect is to make people in India no worse off, and to have no effect on people elsewhere. His existence lowers world average income, because India has a below average income. In your terms, he adds "less to the global resources... than the current average resource share." He has made nobody worse off yet, by your criterion, he has made the world worse. That's a fallacy of composition.
That's a perfectly valid objection, indeed using only averages is a huge (but common) approximation. Going in your direction and using some usual (I think) assumptions of economic theory, you could even argue that it's impossible for an actor to consume more than he produce, because it's capacity to acquire resource directly reflect his production. But then it's never perfect, you have the common, unpaid resources and also social safety nets and redistribution that ensure this is not the case....And in the perfect case, this ask the symmetric question: is it also impossible to produce more than your consumption? ;-)
Anyway, in your example, this hypothetical indian would indeed be neutral: the average are not usefull cause of inhomogenity of both consumption and production, but he really change nothing in the SOL of all other, which is the real definition of neutral. I guess you can also be both a net producer or net consumer depending which group you consider, which even further complicates things....but it kind of goes in the same direction of my main point: it's extremelly difficult and thus mostly ideological to check if humanity is in a positive-sum or negative-sum state....So maybe it is worth checking the consequences in term of global cooperation v.s. competition, commerce vs violence, global vs local focus, individual freedom vs centralized control, natality effect, etc. Maybe all of those are indirectly affected by the resource/population marginal cost (not sure how to call it, there should a better word tha negative/posive sum), but, while indirect, they are easier to measure (Pinker try to get some measure of those kind of things, at least).
And the recent scares (GW, covid, terrorism) pushing for more centralized control, the trouble regarding global trade between US, China, Europe, the price increase for some raw resources (wood, energy, construction stuff) and of housing, the negative inflation-adjusted interest rates, all seems to go in the direction of negative-sum-global game...Maybe it's transient, maybe it's coincidence, or maybe it's the revenge or the club of Rome and collapsology is partially right (in the phenomenon, although I do not think any Mad-Max or extinction scenario is probable, it's just going back to a more violent, more hierarchic and more local world....with reduced average SoL....
The baby is not born clutching a deed, but born in a vessel for politics and violence. A lot of deedless babies, after they grow up, are ignored at your peril.
That's why I specified "in a market society." Your child might steal stuff from my child, either through direct action or politics. But your child might also help pay off a national debt that my child was paying, share the cost of defending our country, write a book my child enjoys reading, ... . There are lots of possible positive and negative externalities, which is why the piece I published on the subject back in 1972 concluded that the size of externalities in both directions was sufficiently uncertain that I couldn't sign the sum, say whether the net was positive or negative. That's my opinion with regard to climate change as well.
You should, because it's clearly a component of standard of living. All things equal, It's better to be surrounded by non polluted, non-crowded countryside. But not necessarily pristine: There could be indirect benefits in term of ecosystem, but disease-carrying, blood sucking insects clearly decrease quality of life. So again, it's complicated: not only is it very incompletely priced so consumable without true costs, but what is the best (from a human point of view) state of nature? It's clearly not destroyed, but it's clearly not untouched either....
I certainly do not want to preserve every variety of mosquito. If we can wipe out one particularly obnoxious species of mosquito, one of hundreds, I say go for it.
But that is a distraction from the fundamental question of valuing nature. What if we can triple per-capita GNP at the cost of wiping out half the species on Earth. Is that a net positive? Not in my ledger.
There are many persons in this thread who are certain their children will be a net benefit to the Earth. I wonder how much value they ascribe to nature...
If you consider that, depending on who you ask, the kind of person that would be an asset or a liability is different, it's even more complicated than that. One more reason to look at it though the indirect consequences instead of trying to use direct measurements...
>>we only have the next few years to solve the climate crisis reasonably well<<
This is BS.
* We are not going to solve the "climate crisis reasonably well". Anyone who follows politics should know this. Things are going to get worse slowly. OTOH we are not going to lose billions of people.
Fewer people are the only viable solution. Fortunately this is happening rapidly (about as fast as could be imagined giving the enormous inertia of population).
Is everybody ignoring the fact that if everyone has two children, the population will decline?
Stewart Brand:
>>Worldwide, birthrates are in free fall. Around one-third of countries now have birthrates below replacement level (2.1 children per woman) and sinking. Nowhere does the downward trend show signs of leveling off. Nations already in a birth dearth crisis include Japan, Italy, Spain, Germany, and Russia – whose population is now in absolute decline and is expected to be 30 percent lower by 2050. On every part of every continent and in every culture (even Mormon), birthrates are headed down. They reach replacement level and keep on dropping. It turns out that population decrease accelerates downward just as fiercely as population increase accelerated upward, for the same reason. Any variation from the 2.1 rate compounds over time.<<
China will quite possibly not exist as a functioning nation-state within ten years, but I agree that places like Korea and Italy are in for a very rough time.
There's either going to be some kind of system crash followed by a rather rocky transition to more conservative governments and lifestyles, or we'll use transhuman technologies to patch over the problem by escaping the human condition. The liberal status quo is not sustainable.
People are having fewer children because they live in cities. This is not rocket science.
Brand in 2005:
>>Cities are population sinks-always have been. Although more children are an asset in the countryside, they’re a liability in the city. A global tipping point in urbanization is what stopped the population explosion. As of this year, 50 percent of the world’s population lives in cities, with 61 percent expected by 2030. In 1800 it was 3 percent; in 1900 it was 14 percent.<<
In what sense are children an asset in the countryside within developed nations? Unless you're living like the Amish, it's currently illegal to use them as labour.
A lot of people could also reasonably afford to move out into the suburbs or rural areas and still make a good living if having children was their main priority (which would also help to revitalise rural areas.) Being in the cities is a sign that this wasn't their priority to begin with.
>>In conclusion, climate change will probably be very bad for the world, but not in a way that will have catastrophic effects on your child in particular. Cancelling plans to have kids because of climate change will decrease emissions a very limited amount, while having a disproportionately large effect on the government’s ability to pass climate change related legislation. A less destructive way of assuaging your guilt over having children would be to donate some money to climate charities or carbon offsets in your kid’s name. Nobody who really wants a kid should avoid having one because of climate-related concerns.<<
I almost always agree with your thinking, so it's a novelty to read something I disagree with.
First let me clarify that your analysis of the actual risks from AGW is excellent. The biggest risk (and you focus on this) is sea-level rise. This will be extremely disruptive but will not actually kill many people.
Now if your goal is to assuage guilt over having children, I'm right there with you. No guilt required. World fertlity is in free fall. Anyone who wants kids should go right ahead. I recommend two or one, but I'm not going to lose sleep over three or four.
So fine: FOLKS, DON'T FEEL GUILTY ABOUT HAVING KIDS!!
>>Cancelling plans to have kids because of climate change will decrease emissions a very limited amount,<<
NOW this is where you go off the rails. You are imagining fewer American Democrats. In a few decades of "climate change will probably be very bad for the world" Republicans will be screaming for action to slow down global warming.
Imagine if every generation had an average of one kid. As Brand points out, the effect is geometric:
Gen 1: 4 billion kids (SWAG)
Gen 2: 2 billion kids
Gen 3: 1 billion kids
Gen 4: .5 billion kids
How long is four generations? Perhaps 150 years. You better believe that .5 B kids instead of 4 B will generate a lot less carbon.
I'm exaggerating the rate of population decline to make the effect more graphic. So it takes 300 years instead of 150. Not having kids would decrease emissions by an ENORMOUS amount over time.
Sure, in a hypothetical world where climate change is still a thing in 300 years. And where there are no population subset effects (ie groups who ignore everyone else and just have as many kids as they can.)
Rational types have this technique where you try to make the strongest argument possible for the other side, maybe even an argument so good that it could convince people on your side to change their minds. When I applied this sort of thinking to the pro life/pro choice issue (I’m pro life), I came up with something like an inversion of your ‘there will be less Democrats to stop climate change denial’ argument. Then I realized the logic applied to several other issues people on the right tend get worked up about.
To wit: People on the right are always getting worked up about people on the left’s reproductive choices (direct and indirect). Many things could qualify: same-sex relationships, transgenderism, sex strikes (proposed during the height of #metoo), and the aforementioned issue of abortion. But should they get worked up? All of these options likely decrease, in ways both big and small, the future number of people on the left, exclusively. So, in some perhaps Machiavellian sort of way, shouldn’t people on the right be *encouraging* people on the left to embrace these things instead of decrying them?
I know that’s kind of evil, but I think rational types would have to admit it’s a damn persuasive argument to make to people on the right! Of course, the same sort of argument could be made to people on the left about, say, the refusal to wear masks or get vaccinated or the propensity to down toxic horse paste, etc. I feel like you may have made this point somewhere recently.
This is a valid point. I think Scott admitted/covered it in his piece. It’s not meant to be a perfect science, just a directional idea. On balance, the children of Republicans are more likely to lean toward core Republican values and away from core Democrat values — in so far as party affiliation is a proxy for the beliefs and activities under discussion.
“from the testimonies of the abortion providers we *know*…Republicans have abortions just as often as democrats.”
Your confidence level in this information, which seems to be the basis for your counter-claim, seems disproportionate to the source of that information. I personally would need to see some data before entertaining this claim at all, let alone being so confident in it that I believed Republicans and Democrats have abortions in equal numbers. On its face, given the demographics of both abortion and party affiliation, this seems highly unlikely.
Given that and the racial demographics(only 39% of abortion patients are white) it really strains credulity to imagine Republicans are getting abortions at the same rate as Democrats. One wonders how exactly "abortion providers" "know" this. Is there a box on the form stating political affiliation? Do they strike up political conversations with their patients? It's probably just wishful thinking and projection.
I looked into red states vs blue states. It's fairly noisy but what trend one can see suggests fewer abortions in red states. Mostly it suggests that states with lots of abortion clinics have the highest rates of abortions.
I'm not sure I saw anyone rightists getting 'worked up' over sex strikes. I saw them mock them or otherwise point out the absurdity of the situation (e.g. can't make an actual argument so they'll threaten to withhold sex), but not worked up in the sense of upset or worried about it, like worried that men/themselves are going to miss out on sex.
Being pro-life requires a deep ethical objection to abortion. Most people who are pro-life view abortion as literally an act of murder. For people like that, utilitarian calculations don't factor into things.
Fair point. That was my weakest example, I admit. The sex strike was more of a humorous point when I originally made it to a friend. But it did get me thinking along these same lines.
As for "utilitarian calculations," recall my setup for this. I was trying to make the strongest argument possible for the other side, one that could potentially persuade pro-lifers to accept a pro-choice position. Of course fetus murder is still a big problem for pro-lifers and major stumbling block toward my goal. But if I could get pro-lifers to accept the logic of my argument, I think I might have a shot. After all, if less fetus murder is your ultimate goal, reducing the future population of people who consider fetus murder acceptable gets you closer to that goal.
Incidentally, this reminds me of a point the Freakonomics authors made about why crime suddenly dropped 1990s. They attributed it to abortion becoming legal after Roe v Wade. In fact, reading that may have been what originally stimulated this line of thinking.
This is hardly a novel idea, many on the right support abortion for these reasons. And I saw a lot of support for the sex strikes. It was totally indicative of the perceived cuckoldry of being a male feminist. You do everything right, you're a nice enlightened man, get yourself into a relationship with a nice enlightened woman, and then you get punished for what other men do.
But it can be a double-edged sword if taken too far. Think about the transgender issue. What percentage of those Democrat-voting parents of transgender kids was happy when they discovered their "orientation?" Very close to zero. Some speak of it as if the kids has been diagnosed with some cancer, the parents are suffering but have to "be strong" to "be there" for the suffering child. And they tell themselves that every single generation of humans in history has had this problem and that they have to "accept" the new identity lest their children commit suicide. I think deep down many suspect it's more a social contagion than anything else, which is why they're so intent on making sure every child in America is exposed to the propaganda I mean enlightenment in the public schools. If we had checks on internal migration or rigid segregation such as separate school systems for Republicans or democrats, taking a pro-trans for eugenic reasons stance might be a good idea. But we don't, we only have one public school system, so it's a better strategy to stand and fight.
I will have more to say later, but first a quick point.
First would per capita emission of carbon will certainly be lower in the future, but persons in less developed countries will almost certainly emit more.
People not having kids due to climate change (to the extent that its a genuine phenomenon) is likely to be seriously dysgenic. It's precisely the sort of people who would think along these lines, i.e. high IQ, conscientious, high future time orientation, who we need to be having more kids.
I will say though that population not mattering feels a bit misguided. Yes, we have a short period of time left to act to avert climate disaster and more kids doesn't impact that timeline, but its not 'set and forget'. What works now won't necessarily work 50 years down the line if the population continues expanding and more pressure if placed on net positive side of the carbon balance. If we get good at removing carbon from the atmosphere, the fewer people means more is done is actually reduce globally temperature rather than using that capacity to simply stop things getting worse. And of course, if we fail at reaching net zero or otherwise still face negative climate effects then the more people, the worse these effects will relatively be.
And I think we oughtn't focus narrowly on climate change but the environment generally. Even if we get emissions under control, there's still issues of water availability, soil degradation through increasingly large scale industrial agriculture required to support a huge population etc.
You are assuming that people who agree with you are particularly good people, possibly assuming that the argument for the position is obviously right. It isn't. Despite the current orthodoxy, it is not clear that climate change has net negative effects, there is very little reason to believe it has catastrophic effects, and there is no good reason to think that the policies that would be pushed by the people with these views will have desirable effects, even if they are correct in believing that climate change is a serious threat.
As I pointed out in another comment, one of the largest things the U.S. has done in response to political pressure to do something about climate is biofuels. It is now generally agreed that it doesn't actually reduce CO2 — Al Gore has conceded that, and admitted, to his credit, that part of the reason he supported it was he was running for president and Iowa has an early primary. What it has done is to raise the price of maize, thus getting political support from farmers, turn something like ten percent of the world crop of maize into alcohol, and so contributed to world hunger. The actual consequence of policies pushed by people who thought they were conscientious, high future time preference, etc. was to make a very large number of poor people somewhat poorer.
On your "short period of time," I don't know if you have been paying attention to the issue long enough to notice that for the past thirty years or so (I haven't checked the exact timing), authoritative figures — one of them was the "chief scientist" of Australia — have been announcing that we only have ten years to do something, after that it will be too late. I have not yet seen one of them, ten years later, saying that since it's now too late we should stop trying to do anything about the problem.
William Nordhaus, who got an econ Nobel for his work on the implications of climate change, had a piece in the NY Review of Books attacking a WSJ op-ed that had argued climate was not an emergency requiring rapid action. He gave his estimate of the net cost of doing nothing for fifty years, relative to doing the right things starting now. It was $4.1 trillion. He tried to make it sound like a large number, but for a cost spread over the entire globe and a century or so it works out to a small fraction of one percent of total GNP. For details, and a link to his piece, see:
It's been a long time since machine production was limited by human shortage, if ever: When desired number of machine increase when population increase (and in practice, it's almost always the case), it may even be a logical contradiction.
Number of qualified humans may be a factor (less and less so I think), but if your goal is to output more machines of type X, I don't think "making more babies" will make to your top-100 ways to reach this goal ;-)
Here and now, machine production seems to be limited by a shortage of truck drivers. And of high-end microchips, whose production is itself limited by the very small number of people and institutions that know how to make them.
"Yes, we have a short period of time left to act to avert climate disaster"
So we keep being told. But each time the supposed deadline is reached, we are given another one farther in the future.
As I have pointed out elsewhere in this discussion, William Nordhaus, arguing in favor of immediate action, estimated the cost of waiting fifty years to do anything relative to taking optimal action immediately at $4.1 trillion. He tried to make that sound large, but spread out over the globe and a century or so that's about 1/20th of one percent of global GNP.
The big advantage of waiting is that we gain information, which might tell us that there is nothing we should be doing, might tell us that we should be doing something, but not what us currently being urged, might tell us to do what is being urged, perhaps more of it.
The most uncharitable reading of the second argument is "We must produce more children to further our political goals". The most charitable is "We, the good people, should produce more people to add value to the world in future".
While I don't necessarily disagree with either, if these arguments become commonplace, I'm interested in the rabbitholes they produce in future.
"One way to think of this is to notice that we’ve already gotten about 25-30% of the global warming we’re likely to see by 2100."
This is true in terms of average temperature rise, but misleading in terms of impacts. Many outcomes are non-linear, so the last 0.1 degree of temperature increase (under whatever scenario) is associated with much more severe outcomes than the first 0.1.
I don't disagree with the conclusions of the post, but I think your response to the first point makes a mistake I see a lot: the idea that the most significant impacts of climate change are climate (hotter temperatures) and its immediate effects (weather, sea level).
In 2006-2011 Syria experienced the worst drought it had seen in decades. Impoverished and disaffected people streamed into cities as their farms and small communities collapsed. This led directly to the civil war, ISIS becoming a relevant terrorist threat, and a large chunk of migration from Syria to Europe. When I see the effects this one extreme weather event had on so much of the world (I would include the current rise of nationalism in Europe here), I wonder what the effects will be when 100 year floods / droughts / hurricanes are happening every 10 years, or even every year. Changes in wind patterns will change which areas and even nations are capable of supporting themselves through agriculture, which will then trigger similar effects. Millions of people don't starve to death without trying to take action.
If I were to pick the climate change consequences that most concern me, they would be war, terrorism, mass migration, rightwing backlash, and nuclear annihilation.
The latest IPCC report has a global map showing what regions they are moderately confident have above average levels of drought and what regions they are moderately confident (or very confident, but there aren't any, or have low confidence) have above average levels of drought because of climate change. There are only two regions out of about 45 which they are moderately confident have above average levels of drought due to climate change. One is western North America, where many of us live, and one is Med, which I assume means mediterranean. I'm not sure if that includes Syria or if that is in WCA, which I think means Western Central Asia, which has above average drought (medium confidence) but low confidence in human attribution.
In support of your worries, however, the IPCC does think that climate change in the future will increase agricultural and ecological drought, defined as low enough levels of water in the soil to reduce agricultural or ecological output. On the other hand, they don't seem to be paying attention to the fact that increased CO2 concentration decreases the need of plants for water, since they can get the carbon they need while passing less air through the leaves and so losing less water, which should to some degree reduce that problem.
If there are 100 reasonably independent areas on earth and we are tracking 10 climate variables (drought, floods, hurricanes, heat waves, etc.) then how many 100 year events will we see on average every year across the globe?
The existence of these events proves nothing other than there are extremes in climate, it is the global trend that matters. There are some regional trends that show changes but it must also be established that these rare events are caused by climate change and not just statistical anomalies that have always occurred.
IPCC AR5:
“In summary, the current assessment concludes that there is not enough evidence at present to suggest more than low confidence in a global-scale observed trend in drought or dryness (lack of rainfall) since the middle of the 20th century due to lack of direct observations, geographical inconsistencies in the trends, and dependencies of inferred trends on the index choice. Based on updated studies, AR4 conclusions regarding global increasing trends in drought since the 1970s were probably overstated. However, it is likely that the frequency and intensity of drought has increased in the Mediterranean and West Africa and decreased in central North America and north-west Australia since 1950”
Additionally many areas have sparse instrumental data from the past 100 years necessary to see small changes in outcomes. Syria is subject to droughts. The Middle East is subject to political instability. Connecting dots all the way to ISIS is quite a stretch. Hindcasting climate attribution of a specific event is basically cheating mathematically, tying this to political outcomes is even sketchier. If one is confident in their models they should be able to predict outcomes. This would be much more convincing. What do the same models forecast for Syria in the next 25 to 50 years?
Ultimately though Syria is better off by improving their resistance to droughts through infrastructure, not by buying solar panels and wind turbines in the USA. Regardless of this the past, present, and future political instability in the region is very likely not weather induced.
The idea was not to tie this specific disaster to climate change, which would be effectively impossible, but to point out extreme weather events can have major downstream effects which Scott left out of this article (though he mentions it in the follow-up).
I think the IPCC adjusts some of my priors, but there remains a body of evidence behind the risk of increased extreme events. I see the downstream effects of these events as the biggest downside of climate change.
Will bad outcomes occur? Probably in some form or another but they are going to be rather difficult to parse. For example per capita deaths from most climate events have been going down by almost an order of magnitude since 1900. This is due in part to better overall technology, better infrastructure, and in some cases climate change itself (e.g. less extreme cold events). Parsing out small dependencies with large background changes is always difficult. The trend towards fewer deaths is likely to continue. Things aren't getting worse in many categories, the argument really is they are not getting optimally better.
The trend of war deaths is down significantly during the era of climate change. Why is this not because of climate change? The eastern front in WWII might have been a bit more pleasant in 2020. You will find this pattern over and over. Only negative trends are tied to climate change and many of these observations are rather tenuous in nature. Many people actually think the food supply is decreasing because it is reported climate change is affecting crop yields. Careful reading shows the claim is actually that climate change is slowing down a pretty dramatic increase in crop yields over the past 100 years. Framing bias is rampant in day to day climate change coverage.
I think you are misunderstanding my point. It is not "look at these trends, causal relationship is left as an exercise for the reader". It is, put basically, large shifts in the status quo ripple through society in unpredictable ways, and the kinds of issues we expect to see from climate change have the potential to do so in a very negative way. War deaths could continue to trend downwards for the next 50 years, only to claim most of humanity due to nuclear war triggered, in part, by dramatic sociological changes brought about by climate change.
How sure are you that more CO2 in the atmosphere is a bad thing? It might be good. Maybe warming is holding back the next ice age. (Do climatologists understand what causes and stops an ice age?)
Technically, we are in an ice age and have been for several million years, an ice age being defined as a period with an ice cap on one or both poles. We are in an interglacial; what you are describing is a glaciation.
That said, I agree that the possibility that warming is keeping the current interglacial from ending should count as a very low probability/high cost risk of preventing warming. Estimates of the costs of climate change, in particular by Nordhaus, include low probability/high cost terms in the other direction, so should include that one.
Yeah, I'm all in favor of limiting carbon. But don't know how to do the math on the next ice age. (We need to convince enough people that nuclear is great, because sure there are byproduct/ left overs. But look how small and well contained they are compared to CO2. (And we may want to 'cook' them again in breeder reactors..)
"The data is quite clear that we are heading in the wrong direction on virtually all macro trends (not with respect to any particular historical benchmark, but with respect to the future in relationship to the present: is it going to be better)."
I must admit to being worried about the future too. Perhaps our worries differ. My take for whatever it is worth is that this is about the best life has ever been for humanity. But it is a lot easier going down than up.
Assumption: every generation of child-bearing age couples has an average of 1 child. (total fertility rate = 1.0) Generation = 30 years.
In other words: in and around 2050 2 billion child-bearing persons have approximately 1 billion kids (obviously not all in the same year). For simplicity these calculations assume that the TFT remains constant.
Now (2020): 2 billion kids
Gen 1 (2050): 1 billion kids
Gen 2 (2080): 500 million kids
Gen 3 (2110): 250 million kids
Gen 4 (2140): 125 million kids
Gen 5 (2170): 65 million kids
150 years from now 65 million children would be born. This is an extreme possibility to show the dramatic effect of low fertility.
Assuming 1.5 children per couple. This is a recent estimation of world TFT in 2100. Russia and 29 other countries already have a TFT of 1.5 or lower. 65 more countries are already below the replacement rate of 2.1.
Now (2020): 2 billion kids
Gen 1 (2050): 1.5 billion kids
Gen 2 (2080): 1.125 billion kids
Gen 3 (2110): 844 million kids
Gen 4 (2140): 633 million kids
Gen 5 (2170): 475 million kids
Half a billion children born in 2170 is a realistic rough estimate.
Why should fertility continue to decline? This is primarily an effect of urbanization. Continued increases in the urbanization of the Earth are quite likely.
I think Scott was perhaps using the kid-gloves in terms of pushing the point, but I'd think going down the road a bit further with the concept can be helpful.
If you don't have kids, then you and your ideas are already dead. A tiny handful of meaningful ideas, inventions, and the like pass through the generations through means other than descent, but broadly speaking every set of beliefs and ideas are able to be sustained through parenting and community.
It isn't just about voters or issues, it is your entire world view which dies with you unless you've passed it onto your children. As a conquerer of nations and ideas, one can simply ignore pretty much anything said by someone who says they plan on not having children. Whatever it is they want, think, say or do, it is extremely likely that will all die with them.
Several no-children cults have existed throughout history and aside from a handful of parasitic monastic orders which serve as de facto orphanages and school or provide some other useful function, they have all died out. A parasite cannot survive without the nourishment of the host organism. And any cult that is not a repository for discarded and abandoned people within a larger framework of child having peoples will inherently die out.
To both declare my ideas matter to me sooo much I'm willing to make incredible sacrifices, but then to also orchestrate a plan with a 0% success rate over time seems to be quite foolish. It is a strategy of defeat in a war of ideas where the propagation of largely ideas coincides with the propagation of people.
Truly the idea of 'no kids to solve xyz problem' is unrelated to 'climate change is a problem'. The climate change problem is a set of issues with a large number of possible solutions. So fixating upon a single approach for no good reason which has a 0% success rate over any period of time is approaching absurdity. The solution being to fail within a single generation trying to promote something almost no one will accept is no solution at all.
I think it is very important to parse these ideas as separate things in terms of identifying problems, solutions, tactics, approaches, efficacy, and palatability. As Scott says, even arguing this point is almost pointless since no more than a tiny sub 2% of people will ever entertain this idea or follow through with it across their lives.
Can everyone tolerate changes in unseen factory, farming, mining, energy generation, transportation and waste management processes which are already mostly invisible to them? Sure they can!
Truly all we need is a handful, perhaps a few tens of thousands of elites in positions of power to do things slightly differently, then problem solved. Instead of the 'impossible?' task of changing a few minds, we could somehow 're-educate' the entire world such that a meaningful number of people will have fewer children? What nonsense is this 'plan'? Even if births were slowed down by 10% or something....climate change will still 'destroy the world' over say 300 years instead of 200 years if nothing else changes.
And if other things can change like new farming practices or not-so-new technologies like solar power...why not just speed that up a bit and people can make money along the way rather than trying to push a deeply deeeply unpopular idea of getting people not to have children?
If you're a one-in-a-million apex-tier intellectual, sure, maybe. That doesn't make this a viable strategy for maintaining cultural assets for the average person, not to mention genetic inheritance.
I'd broadly agree with the above, as well as the argument that human ingenuity can in principle vastly expand the resources available for our use, though I also think people are being too hard on Malthus et al- the man was basically right for 99% of human history and continued to be right for large chunks of Africa during the 60s/70s/80s. (Norman Borlaug, who did more to avert the consequences of the population bomb than perhaps any other individual in history, also never dismissed population growth as some irrelevant hangup.)
I also think techno-libertarians can be a little blasé about the idea that sufficiently advanced technology means we'll simply never had to worry about population growth in future- 5% growth per annum would exhaust the available resources of the solar system in less than a thousand years. And by that I mean the combined mass of human beings would exceed the combined mass of the solar system, including the sun.
Zeroing in on climate change is missing the mark. "Climate change" is just a stand-in for a more amorphous sense that the world is getting worse.
There is more cynicism and uncertainty about the future for 100s of reasons. Employment is increasingly precarious and lower paid, housing is expensive, the government is a failure, we are still in the middle of a global pandemic. Every institution has failed, badly. COVID could've been handled 10x better in the West, but it wasn't. The Fed seemingly did what they always do - bailed out the rich via low interest rates. Every city I've worked/lived in has become more of a ghost town - rents keep rising, almost everyone gets driven out, businesses shut down and good luck meeting people in that environment.
My sense is anyone's answer to "do I want kids?" is a function of 1. how stable and secure they feel their life is now 2. how optimistic they are about the future. Just looking at those questions from a financial POV, most of us don't make it. Add on all the other bullshit, its hard to find reasons to be optimistic today. The world simply can't support the level of population we have today at reasonable living standards - even if it can at a fundamental, technological/scientific level, it certainly is failing to do so because of political factors. Why would anyone bring a kid in to that world?
I've sometimes wondered if climate change is being pumped up as a big spooky doomsday scenario to provide a left-wing-palatable scapegoat for other social disasters, but I suppose Scott would call that a little too cynical.
The topic of *why* birthrates are declining so precipitously is complicated and I don't mean to be unsympathetic to those in a genuinely precarious economic situation, but I'm always a little skeptical of economic hardship as being a reliable monocausal explanation for a lack of children. There's generally a very robust inverse correlation between fertility and income within any given country- the people who can most afford to have children are having few or none, and the people who can least afford to have children are having the most.
I have a suspicion that if you took the tax breaks and legal perks currently associated with marriage and applied them to the status of marriage-with-children, birthrates might perk up somewhat. Particularly if you applied a higher tax rate to the childless and used the revenue for pro-natal subsidies. But I guess packaging that up politically would be a challenge. But in theory the idea would be to shift children from being an economic and reputational liability back to being an economic and reputational asset, as they would have been in Ye Olden Dayes.
politically, just have the american right wing dump the fusionist ideology and go Hungary/Russia in their policies towards family formation. Trump's reign does show tht the "small government" stuff is in many ways a mask and more active state-policies pursued by Bannon or whatnot to improve family formation can be pushed within an overton window.
Sorry, I just googled 'fusionism' to get some idea of what you were talking about- yeah, I can broadly agree that the GOP alliance with libertarian business elites has been a marriage of convenience where the social conservatives don't seem to be conserving much of anything. I think the association of small-government capitalism with conservatism was largely an accident of history due to the US being founded as a radical enlightenment project by the standards of it's time- capitalism itself as a driver of technological growth and innovation tends to erode social stability, for better or for worse.
That said, I'm not convinced that active-state policies in the same vein as Hungary and Russia have yielded a large impact on birthrates as of yet (and for a lot of these countries it's probably too late.)
Once we deal with the Ponzi scheme nature of our social security system, a smaller population will provide many benefits to our country. Couples in North America and Europe have already voluntarily decided to reduce their births below replacement levels and if other nations are prevented from dumping their excess population on those areas maybe they will too. Young people will have less competition for jobs and higher wages and will pay far less for housing. We will have a chance to slow climate change and wildlife habitat will be protected from urban sprawl giving threatened species a chance to survive. The benefits are many and varied.
Actually, the retirement crisis in the United States is likely to be relatively mild compared to similar problems with boomers exiting the workforce in Europe, China and Korea, precisely because US birthrates have been relatively high (and supplemented with migration), whereas low birthrates in most of the rest of the OECD has created a top-heavy demographic pyramid where a steadily shrinking pool of working youngsters have to look after ageing retirees, which increases the burden of taxation and pressure on the health system. Obviously there are risks associated with overpopulation when fertility rates are too high, but if resources are not seriously constrained (and in the developed world they are not), then low birthrates make life harder for the young, not easier.
Peter Zeihan covers the topic in some detail here.
This might just be me howling into the void, but Peter Zeihan has outlined how declining birthrates have been/are likely to be a major contributor to economic stagnation/decline collapse in the coming decades (I personally reckon that radical advances in automation/longevity might be the only counter to this, but who knows.) Hopefully Scott might get a chance to read Disunited Nations and bring the problem to wider attention.
Having children is unethical although I don't think the impending climate apocalypse makes it notably less ethical. Still being in the 1% of people worldwide materially is meaningless, the question is simply is anyone better off living? The answer is no.
And adds the extreme version of the commitment to this belief system: voluntary sterilization.
This updates the list of ways progressives are eliminating themselves from the gene pool that I started in another comment: sex strikes (a bit silly, but still notable) , same-sex relationships, climate celibacy (loosely the topic here), abortion, transgenderism, sterilization.
Some merely reduce the odds of reproduction, others ensure reproduction cannot ever happen. Whatever the case, it seems to me like progressives are aggressively pushing 'selection' away from themselves, ensuring future Americans will be less progressive.
How big of an effect this will have I do not know. Weiss offers some statistics on births, deaths and celibacy. I wonder if anyone has done an ideological/political analysis of this type of data? For instance, "the number of deaths exceeded that of births in 25 states," Weiss writes. Are those blue states? Purple states? Red states? Etc.
Political progressivism follows the same trend as IQ scores: at a genetic level it's probably being slowly eroded by fertility differences but cultural/environmental factors will probably make up the difference on short-to-medium timescales.
This is part of why I keep saying that the future will either be transhuman or conservative. Barring wide-scale adoption of gene-editing biotech to enhance longevity and upgrade other human attributes, over long timescales fertility differences are ultimately going to hand total demographic victory to conservatism, with the largest advantage going to paleoconservatives like the hutterites, hasidism, and certain muslim groups. A planetary cage match between those contenders would not be fun to witness, but as long as the modern world keeps inducing smart, tolerant, creative, open-minded and altruistic people to commit genetic suicide, this is what you can ultimately look forward to.
I was generally in agreement until you implied “smart, tolerant, creative, open-minded and altruistic” were qualities that are mutually exclusive with politic and religious conservatism. Did you mean to suggest that, say, Hasidic Jews or devout Muslims cannot be smart or creative?
Yeah, perhaps that's a little simplistic. Obviously there's a lot of individual variation.
I would suspect, however, that smart and creative people born into hasidic/muslim families are more likely to get sucked into the higher education pipeline and then get absorbed into progressive culture.
That’s an interesting point. I suppose that’s right for Muslims in America these days. But I believe Hasida have their own schools. Thanks for the engagement!
No worries. The point about altruism can be debated as well I suppose- having 7 kids per family may be excessive, but sacrificing a significant chunk of your freedom and income to bring children into the world can be argued to be an act of altruism, at least in moderation, and religious conservatives are more likely to do this.
This is why I have a certain sympathy for the conservative wing of the political spectrum. For all their other foibles and bad habits, they are pulling their weight in a way that liberals are fundamentally not doing.
The sea level estimates of IPCC are very conservative, they are not a good example to hold unfortunately. The glacier melting can be extremely nonlinear, like popping the cork from a wine bottle. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPBzUVsJqm4
How is it possible for a baby to produce a ton of anything in a year? It would have to produce over six pounds every second! It is, further, idiotic to claim that people in the distant future, who don't even exist now, can produce anything at all this year. And this year, or now, is all that we can effect or that can effect us, or the world, now.
There is nothing remotely true about catastrophic earth 'sciences.' Shut up and let me enjoy my 440 CI blown hemi at full throttle.
I have to comment that the hiveminded congratulatory response to this rinky dink STEM guy piece is not justified.
This stream of bald assertions:
>Climate change will cause worse hurricanes, fires, and other disasters. It will lead to increased spread of invasive species and diseases. It will hit subsistence farmers in poor agricultural countries very hard, and some of them will starve or become refugees. But it won’t cause the collapse of civilization. It won’t kill everyone. Life in the First World will continue, with worse weather and maybe a weaker economy, but more or less the same as always. The people who say otherwise are going against the majority of climatologists, climate models, and international bodies.
…is not supported by the linked article, whose primary argument is that climate change will be "devastating", just not existential (i.e., causing the death of every human and all humanity), or by any argument or evidence in your piece. A handful of decontextualized maps and a handwaving aside about how millions of citizens in low lying cities can "just move" as if this is not a massive disturbance to a delicate cultural geographical order are fascinating exhibits of such lack of empathy and imprudence as to border on the hypermasculine.
You offer in the comments that defaulting to the authority of the IPCC in your post is all you need to do to convince scared potential parents (in lieu of being correct, I suppose) since they presumably believe the IPCC to found their fears, but if we take our mission-minded sophist hats and replace them with critical thinker hats, we have to wonder whether the nuclear implications of millions of refugees spilling into increasingly fragile democracies to add to explosive conflicts erupting today is something a panel of climate scientists can really relieve us of.
> If you think privileged modern Americans shouldn’t have children now because of quality-of-life issues, you implicitly believe that nobody in the Third World, or nobody before 1900, should ever have had children.
It doesn't imply that at all. There's nothing inconsistent or hypocritical about someone basing this decision on what THEY consider a good life right here and now, and not on what someone else thought was a good life before 1900, or what someone else thinks is a good life thousands of miles away. If someone has kids, they're going to be THEIR kids, not someone else's. If someone in the 1800s thought the world was nice enough for their kids to live in, I believe them, but that is irrelevant to anybody else's situation and doesn't imply that anybody else has to be satisfied with that for their own children.
And either way, most people don't want their children's lives to merely be good, they want their children's lives to be at least as good as or better than their own lives.
Besides, people in the Third World, or before 1900, broadly speaking don't "choose" to have kids in the same way that present-day people in the First World do.
Not sure those crises are real, tbh. Pensions is mostly about how we divide the pie and any demographic gap could be alleviated via immigration/robotics.
The tfr is an illusion as it implicitly assumes that a present day worker is not more effective than a worker now retired.
Imagine that tomorrow's generation is twice as productive as today's. Then clearly the fact that the age pyramid is more of a rectangle doesn't matter in and of itself. The issue will be to convince then workers to share the wealth with us/their parents/the retirees.
Robots help b/c they help maintain production levels with lower pop. As to people being too poor to afford robots/robots' products, it's again a question of sharing the pie.
Tax the robots owners and redistribute the gains would be an obvious way to go about it (via UBI or any other way)
Almost every crisis should be more worrying than the climate crisis.
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?
AR6 was quite clear that for 8 out of the 12 extremes it considered (including all kinds of storms, floods and two different kinds of drought) there was no measurable change. And thank goodness the impact of all the extremes has been dwindling for as long as such impacts have been measured!
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.
"If they had, they probably would’ve realized that having children into lives of such misery and suffering would be immoral"
Doubtful, since most don't commit suicide. People generally prefer existence to non-existence, even in awful circumstances.
https://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/09/poor-folks-do-smile.html
I think there's an element of the hedonic treadmill in these "People in the past lived such awful, miserable lives" kinds of argument. We tend to assume that people with less than us must be less happy, and because we're not generally very happy, that means that they must be really unhappy. In reality, though, this isn't the case: rather it's that we take our material comfort for granted, and so it doesn't make us feel any happier. If we lived in a society with fewer comforts, chances are we'd feel about as happy as we do now.
I don't think people would have regarded having children as immoral. People likely found the circumstances they are used to acceptable. Indeed, at some point in the future, a very advanced society may have no scarcity, disease or death; our society compared to that may be as miserable as the middle ages compared to us. But that doesn't mean it's wrong to have children in our present circumstances (and not just because we need to have descendants for a better future to exist).
However, I strongly disagree with the notion that dying is equivalent to never having existed, and thus it's good to have a child as long as your child won't be so miserable as to commit suicide. No, dying is very bad, in a way never existing isn't, as most of us have a very strong preference not to die. There is a level of misery in which most people wouldn't commit suicide, but such that IMO it's better not to create children into it.
Why are you conflating “individual actions won’t make a difference” with being a “global warming denier”? Those are very different things.
"My broader problem with the second argument is that Scott hasn’t done a cost-benefit analysis; if you spent all the time and money and effort you spent having (and offsetting) a child, does Scott not think you would be able to change a single person’s mind about climate change? Also, I find the idea of having children so that they can be your ideological minions kind of gross. Neither does the world have some kind of shortage of climate scientists and engineers that could only be remedied by upper-middle-class people having children."
I agree that if you spend all the time you were going to spend raising children doing global warming activism, that would be better than having children. I don't think the people this post is addressing are planning to do this, so I didn't bring this up.
"Even though our children’s lives may be approximately the same as ours, it seems that the long-term future from climate change gets a lot worse."
Disagree. I expect the first-world contribution to climate change will stabilize within the next 70 years, based on progress so far and credibly-promised progress later.
"“1-2% of people changing their individual decisions will do basically nothing. What we actually need is concerted government action.” This is the standard global-warming denier argument and has been countered thousands of times (including in the EA community). "
I'm...not aware of these counters? I think there's a decision theoretic argument for doing things yourself, but it's a pretty weak one (eg I've done many things myself, and the promised universalizabilty where everyone then does these things hasn't come through). I think most of the work does have to be done by government action; the only case I can imagine where this turns out not to be true is an amazing moonshot research push by billionaires and other nonprofits, which your child also is not affecting.
I certainly think governments could facilitate the technological advances necessary to solve or mitigate climate change. But I don’t believe they are the most important institutional player. From a more decentralized direction, we have basic scientific research leading to breakthroughs in geothermal, fusion, extraction, etc. We also have businesses and entrepreneurs working to solve the various issues (trying to make a buck.)
If I was the President of the world, I probably would suggest a Manhattan project to create alternative clean energy and or to extract CO2. But absent my winning the coming election, my guess is that millions of people are working on it in a competitive, decentralized way already. The worst thing we could do is get in their way.
The initial Manhattan project did end up with us getting to alternative clean energy, though. Governments refusing to utilize it (especially in its newer, safer forms) is one of the reasons why climate change is an issue at all at this point. (Unless you mean renewables, in which case I have great news for you about breeder reactors!)
Being facetious… perhaps if those destroying nuclear energy had stopped having kids we wouldn’t be worried now about the climate.
Exactly my reaction (although I expressed it in both a more abstract and more agressive way, I think). I wonder if this is not the first part of a two story piece illustrating the double standard for critical analysis of in-group/out-group theories....Or maybe this was more emotional and less analytic than most articles?
"Also, I find the idea of having children so that they can be your ideological minions kind of gross". Yep, this is also the thing that disturb me the most. Here-be-dragons, just look at israelo-Palestinian conflict if you want a painful real-life illustration...
Two points:
1. It makes little sense to base decisions today on effects more than a century out, because the future is very uncertain. In my _Future Imperfect_ I described three different ways we could wipe out the human race in the next century, none of which involved either climate or nuclear weapons — for details see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8talvLDfow. If we avoid such and simply extrapolate what has been happening, in a century we will be much richer with much more advanced technology. We may have problems, but they are unlikely to be the same problems we are worrying about now.
2. I think all three of my children will, in different ways, make the world a better place. But that isn't why I wanted to have children.
I think my kids will make the world a better place. I mean, my other choices are that they'll make it a *worse* place, which would be pretty weird, or thinking they'll have no effect at all, which is also sort of strange.
So maybe you mean something else? Like, you haven't met parents who think their children improve the world by X% where X is a fairly big number? I would agree with that -- few among us think we're raising the next Einstein. But the idea that nobody thinks X > 0 at all seems....strange. Certainly not in agreement with the parents I know.
Maybe a better (because far less tainted by parental love... or blindness if you want to be nasty... Or darwinian optimisation if you want to be coldly scientific) question would be 'would the childrens of some unknown stranger would make the world a (very slightly) better place, or a (very slightly) worse one? It's reconciling the second belief with children desire and a radical effective altruism ideal that is difficult 😅
That was the question I tried to answer in a piece written for the population council almost fifty years ago. I concluded that the size of the effects, positive and negative, was too uncertain to know if the net was positive or negative.
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Laissez-Faire_In_Popn/L_F_in_Population.html
Aaah here we can agree : the effect is uncertain and far away , but the individual benefit of being able to choose your favorite family size is huge. Frankly, the benefit of individual freedom, sense of control on his own life are often neglected in global altruistic cost/benefit analysis. Organised Altruism is often a mean of control, so much that one should think hard about which is the mean and which is the goal...
You know, the only way you can conclude the average new baby has a net negative effect is if you assume people are some kind of evil or ugly phenomenon, have done nothing but ruin Creation for the past 2 million years, and the universe will be better/more beautiful/more marvelous when our species finally dies out.
That's certainly a point of view, but it seems to me unnecessarily cranky and self-loathing. I'm comfortable with the notion that overall, averaged over its 50,000 year history to date, humanity has been a force for creative good in the universe, and has done marvelous and interesting things. It follows that the expected value of a new human life is positive, if only by a small amount. As I said below, there are no constraints on the value added by a particular new life -- it could be hugely positive, hugely negative, or anything in between -- but assuming it will be the average (slightly positive, enough to have brought us from poo-flinging short-lived filthy hooting primates to Mozart, Picasso, and the theory of quantum electrodynamics in 50,000 years) is a very rational assumption to make.
No, it is enough to think there is a finite pour to share among a growing set of invitee.... At one point, the invitee will be hungry and wonder why you invited so many of them. The counter argument is that the pie is in fact not finite, that every new invite bring his own food and on the end everyone will have more varied food the more people come and have fun... It's not a crazy idee and it's great merit of that it has been true in the past, probably multiple times. This may gives a lot of confidence it will be true in the future... But the problem is that it require continuous growth through continuous progress, and this belief is mainly shared between people not responsible for this process (economists, politician, or tech people on fields that are not their own) but not among tech people in their own field (with some exceptions, like IA). And from a personal point of view, it does not look like the pie is growing : progress seems much slower than what i would have guessed when young (Again, exception for IT), and socially it's even worse : for "protecting" the public, power centers (gouvernements, large companies and organizations) become more and more intrusive and controlling. So, even if it has been true in the past, I am not convinced it will continue. I am convinced when are right in pie shrinking, and that will not lead to a mad max scenario but to an effective dictature (end of the post WW2 freedom, which may have been an historical accident - GW, terrorism and covid crisis are the manifestation of what western society become in a shrinking pie context). At this point, i may regret it but I kind of wish for IA overlord, maybe it will be less bad than the coming human version
Sorry, I don't follow at all. That's the risk of arguing by analogy. What is the "pie" and what is the "pouring" and who is doing it? How does that relate to the pretty self-evident point I made that human beings have create a vast marvelous intricate array of fascinating artifacts and ideas, starting from sticks, dirt, stone, and the labor of their own hands?
Sorry, i typed on a phone and this is definitely not a good idea....pouring is pie, so there is nothing original in what I said: it's classic negative/positive/zer-sum games analysis: There is a global share of resources (economical, ecological, anything....the pie) to be allocated to all human beings, and adding one human have two effect: it increase the total amount of things to distribute (because, as you said, people produce things of values to other people - it grows the pie), but it also add one more human which want's his share. If one more guy makes the pie grow more than an average share, then increasing the number of people will benefit everybody. If not, it will reduce the standard of living of existing humans. You think on avergae, one human brings more than he consume. You were right in the past. I thing you are now wrong, probably at least since the seventies...
Having an expected effect of zero doesn't seem that strange to me.
Sure it does. If that were generically true, then life today would be no better than it was in 40,000 BC. Is that plausible? If not, then it follows the net average effect of each additional human born since then is positive. Now, it may be some people have a gigantic positive effect and millions of others have a slight negative effect, or everyone has a modest effect, or any number of things in between. But either the average human has a positive effect, or else you believe life is no better -- or if you prefer there is no more good and beauty in the world -- today than it was 50,000 years ago, which seems silly.
So given the average effect is positive, why would I assume that my kid in particular is below average? That is unnecessarily pessimistic, so I assume he will have the average -- slightly positive -- effect, which is a sound empirical thing to do when you have no better data.
Yes, I believe a relatively small number of humans have an outsized effect via technological progress. Like Greg Clark, I view human history as mostly consisting of Malthusian stasis.
Well OK, fair enough. I'm just pointing out you are taking one more theory-based step than I am, that is, my assumptions are more cautiously empirical. Since I don't know anything about the distribution of contributions of people, nor where my kids fit in that spectrum, I do the simplest possible thing and assign them the average contribution level. Which is positive.
But you know, assigning them an expected effect of strictly zero is mathematically illogical. What you should do is assign them a probability of X% of having a contribution of zero (or negative if you're really pessimistic), and (100-X)% of having an Einstein/Alexander/Plato level of influence. And if you do that, and you use appropriate magnitudes of contribution in each multiplication, you will arrive at an average expected contribution -- which matches mine :)
This reasoning looks sound, but did you consider that maybe, increase of standard of living (SOL) and increase of population (POP) are correlated not because the former is caused by the later, but because they both are mostly factor of another variable, i.e. technical progress? If you agree, then the correlation betwen population and standard of living is no reason to believe more people will necessarily means better SOL? Yes, even if more people increase progress, this still does not imply that increase POP will increase SOL. It may, but it may not, it all depend how progress is linked to population and how SOL is linked to both population and progress. And I would not condemn Malthusians too fast because they were wrong in the seventies. They were right in other places and times, and looking at here and now, they may be right again. Look at housing prices (at least in western europe, I speak about what I know), and standard of living for median income (remove IT stuff, it's an outlier). And do the GW/terrorism/Covid scare only accidents, or a pattern in a global move back to population surveillance and control, one of the 2 possible outcomes of the end of the time of plenty (the other being mad-max style collapse - something I considered as a real possibility when younger but now found completely unrealistic in western and east-asian strong states)
Well but where does technical progress come from? From the minds of people. The more minds, the more progress, seems like a pretty basic correlation. Even if you argue progress comes from a tiny fraction of brilliant minds it's a *fraction* so the more people you have overall, the more brilliant minds.
I don't say the Mathusians are wrong. We are perfectly capable of destroying ourselves through failure to appreciate and deal constructively with limits, the same was as individuals we can kill ourselves by failing to look both ways before we cross the street. Our massed minds are a resource, not a guarantee, one which we can use effectively and wisely, or ineffectively, or even effectively and wickedly (i.e. we destroy ourselves with ingenious weapons).
My explanation for Europe is that it has become sclerotic, and innovation has dried up. So it *looks* like the limit of resources, because the innovation required to grow beyond those limits is being suppressed through malignant social trends. It's as if nobody had figured out drilling for oil when the forests were running out. Geez, we're going to run out of wood to burn soon, and what then? Well, had you discovered oil, the problem would be solved by innovation, but if for some reason the innovative spirit necessary has been stifled -- yeah, it looks like the limit is unassailable.
I don't mean to single out Europe by the way, I think the same thing is happening in the US. Innovation has dropped off a cliff (this is borne out in economic stats, by the way, e.g. the rate of new small business formation has declined considerably). Boldness and new stuff is less socially valued, consistency and equity is more socially valued. Being difference is frowned upon, hewing to the shibboleths more rewarded.
These things happen. The Romans lost their spirit of adventure and enterprise, too. There's no guarantee we won't slide gradually into another long period of stagnation and relative decline. I speak only of potential, not whether we will intelligently realize that potential.
I am very suspicious of this idea that more people means better solutions.
Let's say we need a better, cheaper solution for direct air capture of CO2. Somebody has a bright idea and gathers some investors (public or private). R&D commences.
Now what are the chances that the idea is a complete solution? Practically nil, right? Lots of trial and error happens. The final solution may bear little resemblance to the original idea.
From whence did the solution arise? From investment, R&D, and determination. Not because someone had a bright idea.
That process of investment and R&D could start tomorrow. No need for an idea. What's lacking is the determination. Another billion souls may or may not provide more determination.
Very similar to my reaction.
I expect that the farther we look into the future, the more the negative effects of global warming will be more than counterbalanced by technological progress.
Moreover, the farther into the future, the more time humanity will have had to adapt to the effects of the warming. The most plausible negatives of global warming aren't that a warmer planet is inherently worse than a cooler planet, as much as that a warmer planet is worse (in some ways) for a humanity whose existing infrastructure and population distribution is adapted to the current or near-past climate. In 2100, I can imagine that the adaptations will be ongoing, and causing some disruptions. By 2200, I expect the adaptations to be mostly complete. (Compare: how much it would disrupt our economy if we had to rebuild many of the buildings that were standing by 1940 vs if we had to rebuild many of the buildings that were standing by 1840?)
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Would you rather live fifty years ago? A hundred years ago? By any measurable criterion I can think of, life in the U.S. and in the world on average is better, not worse.
For the world, take a look at the figures on the rate of extreme poverty.
Personally? I'm much better off now than I would have been with my life and job in my part of the world fifty years ago. But I am part of the 1%. People keep inexplicably voting to divert resources from themselves and towards me, and certainly I won't refrain from putting my hands under the money faucet when the money comes out. Nevertheless, I am unconvinced that my cleaner, or my friend who is a graphic designer, or my other friend who is a research scientist, or my little sister who is a nurse, or indeed my other friend who is a sysadmin, or any of my friends' or relatives' kids at all, would not have been better off at a time when purchasing a house was actually possible for people doing the kind of work they do at the ages they are.
I was an adult fifty years ago, and I think you are mistaken. You are focusing on one of multiple changes. And even on that one, home ownership rate at the moment is a little higher than it was in 1971, much higher than it was in 1921.
https://dqydj.com/historical-homeownership-rate-united-states/
Two hundred years ago, we had actual slavery on every inhabited continent. One hundred years ago, we had a world war, and then another one a few years later. Is there a specific time period in the past where you think things were better than they are today?
Nobody owes you a child or an "excuse" for not having one.
I'm not sure they owe anybody any consideration of the idea, either...
"helping them"
I want you to know that, though I have never met you and will not think about you again after the next 24 hours, I truly and sincerely hate you.
I think the thing may be that it doesn't sound like you're necessarily prepared to believe them if they say they just don't want to stay home. There's this vibe that maybe you'd then want to interrogate them until they proved to your satisfaction that they weren't agorophobic.
Even if you and they both agree that they ARE agorophobic, what you write also gives me the feeling that you are the one who gets to decide whether that's a PROBLEM, that you won't accept "I'm agrophobic and I like being agorophobic. I want to stay home because I'm agorophobic and I like it that way.". Or more generally that you feel qualified to pass judgement on WHATEVER reason they may have.
That kind of help has some bad history behind it and a bad reputation.
Yes, thank god this person has no power over me!
People who make different personal choices than you aren't mentally ill and don't need your "help" to "mature". I think that you are a *very* immature and narcissistic person for not understanding this basic idea.
I think you don't really believe that "no one really does it because of climate change". You're just saying so to avoid legitimizing their beliefs or addressing their arguments.
Why would people need the excuse? I don't want children – largely because of the responsibility and limitations! – and I see no reason to make up some other reason for it. It's not what I want for my life and that's it.
When people have spoken to me about not having kids because of climate or, more frequently, because it feels like the world is spinning into disaster, they're people who want kids but are anxious about it for a variety of reasons. They'd be potentially persuaded by this article.
I don't believe it's possible to know the subconscious motivations of large numbers of people you don't know and don't like.
"Excuse"
Dude, do you think people are somehow morally obligated to have children?
It strikes me as being something like the topic of taxation. You can't necessarily wag your finger at any specific individual for being unable to contribute, but if you want your country to not fall apart, then somebody has to do it.
I remember seeing an episode of a BBC comedy show a year or two ago where a woman was relating how some other woman advised her "you need a baby to make sure you have someone to look after you when you get old." "I'm sorry, isn't that the job of the HSE?" <cue raucous laughter> It apparently didn't occur to her that the HSE wasn't staffed and funded by martians, but would have to be run by doctors and funded by taxpayers who all needed to be gestated in wombs.
The usual left-wing dodge for this problem is "well, we can just import more migrants" (because of course exporting the duties and obligations of child-rearing to poor women in other countries is a totally progressive feminist thing to do, but set that aside for the moment.) The larger problem is that birthrates are trending toward below replacement on a global level, and there is no realistic way that the OECD is going to import 500 million migrants to make up for this kind of demographic shortfall.
So... the reason why people scrutinise the decision to not have kids more closely that other private decisions people make is because... it's not really a private decision. It's a choice with enormous external impacts on the wider society and it's not really coherent to demand certain rights and entitlements from that society (like access to a universal health service for the elderly) without recognising certain responsibilities and obligations toward that society (like raising a reasonable number of children.)
Seems weird to me that people should be obligated to go to such extreme measures as creating people that they secretly wish didn't exist in order to contribute to that. Anyway, the idea of having kids to keep society going instead of reversing aging or automating away drudgery reminds me of this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQfyb0aowN8
"Seems weird to me that people should be obligated to go to such extreme measures as creating people that they secretly wish didn't exist in order to contribute to that"
Very few parents wish for their children not to exist once they've actually met them.
"the idea of having kids to keep society going instead of reversing aging or automating away drudgery"
I'm not reflexively opposed to either of those things, but it's simplistic to assume they won't create their own problems. (Radical longevity will create serious long-term problems with overpopulation unless you can drive birthrates down to zero, and many people have a psychological need to feel useful even if the task assigned might feel like drudgery at the time.)
Those are quite complicated topics. But I can say I'm somewhat skeptical that work meets a psychological need to feel useful for everybody. I would guess that only about two-thirds of people get that feeling from work.
Perhaps, but 2/3rds of the population isn't a trivial percentage.
I know this is random but I'm just re-reading this now... and I feel the need to say... you realize it's a bad idea for someone who doesn't want to have kids to have them just because of some vague theoretical statistical idea that they probably won't regret it right?
Like, imagine your kid actually asks "did you want to have me?" and you have to tell them, "no but I figured I'd probably be glad I had you once I did."
Look, I'm gonna be blunt about this- the fundamental liberal assumption that most people are rational actors capable of devising optimal life strategies for both themselves and society at large without any external traditions, guidance, incentives and constraints is patently false and needs to be abandoned. It's not so much expecting each generation to reinvent the wheel as it is like expecting them to reinvent the jet fighter.
The number of women who change their minds about wanting kids between the ages of 20 and 40 is sufficient proof of this by itself, given that, by age 40, it's often impossible to do anything about it. Yes, I imagine there is some non-zero risk of buyer's regret if you tell someone at 20 that will want kids and it turns out by 40 they still don't, but now have to shoulder the awful crushing burden of giving a damn about the next generation of the human species. But this should be weighed against the risk of loneliness and depression for 40-years olds who want a family and by that time can't have one. There is no risk-free strategy here.
To be clear, I am not opposed to making the process of child-rearing easier. Subsidising access to sperm banks, embryo selection and/or pre-natal genetic screening can improve the odds of a child being healthy and well-adjusted. Baby bonuses and changes to tax structure that favour fertility probably wouldn't hurt. So might boosting the incomes of young men for the sake of the 80% of women who prefer part-time work or staying at home and who might be looking for a husband to enable that. But there also need to be massive adjustments in cultural norms and attitudes, such as modern feminism dying in a fire and the same level of social stigma being applied to childless 6-figure-two-income yuppies that we might apply to chain smokers. Because it's not always just about you and your preferred lifestyle.
"The people who say otherwise are going against the majority of climatologists, climate models, and international bodies."
I think this is a bad argument for something, especially given the increasingly high reputational costs of publicly going against this consensus. What do you think based on your review of the evidence?
This is mostly a rhetorical post intended to convince people who are planning not to have kids because of climate change. I think these people trust the IPCC and so it's fair to use the IPCC's conclusions when talking to them without backing them up. If I were writing to try to convince global warming skeptics, I would be more careful about explaining why they should trust IPCC. I personally do trust IPCC but agree that it would be important to justify that if I was talking to people who might not.
Why do you think it is important to convince people who are planning not to have kids to have kids?
For one thing, those who are not having kids due to climate change tend to have convictions that can help fight climate change, and since children usually inherit (or be deeply influenced by) their parents' convictions, those people not having kids are decreasing the amount of total beneficial convictions and increasing pressure on the other sources (e. g. arguing with people who don't have the beneficial convictions to win them over).
okay. Then you should have 2 extra kids to make up for me and my wife not wanting to make a huge personal sacrifice so that there are more people to vote blue no matter who or whatever
More kids = more growth = bigger pie for me to slice from.
Especially given that those considerate enough to decide against kids, have better odds of having kids that contribute strongly to growth if those kids do get the chance to exist
I'll fix your question:
"Why do you think it is important to convince people who are planning not to have kids because of climate change to have kids?"
People who plan no to have kids because of other reasons (like my partner and I) aren't the audience Scott is addressing.
Yep.
From my perspective, if someone made a decision to not have kids as a result of some calculation, and that calculation involved wrong data, I assume they would want to know.
If someone's decision to not have kids correlates with some trait (such as sensitivity or compassion), I am not going to pressure the individual to change their mind, but on a more general level, I will express my worries about the dysgenic effects of such decision. (For example, if intelligent people decide en masse not to have kids, it doesn't make much sense to sign up for cryonics... because it assumes that in the future someone will produce the futuristic science that can wake you up.)
Otherwise, I don't care.
People who are planning not to have kids due to climate change are concerned for the *kids* not for the *planet*. Also, people who don't want to have kids will generally lie about their reasons, because of people like you who will not mind their own reasons.
I am genuinely unsure how you missed this? You are generally a smart dude, but terrible at empathizing with people who don't hold your exact values, something I noticed from your other essays.
If you are so concerned about the Blue tribe reproducing, then have 2 extra kids to make up for me and my wife not making a huge personal sacrifice to do something that we don't want to do.
I don't think Scott thinks having as many kids as possible is a sane way to deal with the climate crisis, and doesn't state that anywhere in the post. It is, however, absolutely true that if the only reason you aren't having kids is the climate, there's probably a hole in your reasoning. If the reason you're not having kids is something else (like, you know, not wanting to spend 18 years of your life vesting huge amounts of resources in another creature) than your reasons remain sound.
But his post *is* an argument for having more kids.
But yes, I wasn't going to have kids anyways. Maybe if I was fantastically rich and could afford a full-time nanny and ensure them a perfect life. Why not? But in the real world, I can't image I would remotely enjoy it. I don't even like kids.
This post is not an argument for having more kids. It is pointing out that 'one' argument for not having kids may not be well thought through. There are many others.
"Nobody who really wants a kid should avoid having one because of climate-related concerns."
Scott doesn't see arguments as soldiers.
You don't seem to have fully read the article (Scott addresses your first sentence's objection in the first section of the essay). You certainly haven't fully understood it, as his motivation is pretty clearly not "being so concerned about the blue tribe reproducing".
If it subjects the IFLS mentality to cognitive dissonance then it's good rhetoric.
Doesn't the increasingly high reputational cost indicate that the consensus is stronger, and that therefore it's a good argument?
Yes it does. The reputational cost is in a direction that makes them more credible on this topic.
Housing & education costs and inflation are much better reasons to give up on having children.
Particularly for Scott's heavily EA audience, right? I'm paying $25k/yr just for daycare, which amounts to failing to save multiple lives *every year* through charitable donation just so I can have a kid. I guess you can argue that my kid is likely to become a net payer to EA causes, but I'm not sure the math on that works out. Actually, having typed that, I feel sure someone in EA has done the analysis already. Anyone have a good link?
From a utilitarian perspective, his kids on average will grow up to have a profoundly more positive impact on the world than kids in developing countries will. What you're describing appears to be a form of extremely narrow utilitarianism wherein people talk about various outcomes in utilitarian terms but use non-utilitarian metrics for judging between those outcomes i.e. that more people dying is worse because people dying is just bad.
As a fellow kid-haver I think it's worth pointing out here that $25k/yr is only a meaningful number for 2 or 3 years when the kid is very small, and the cost drops off exponentially from there. This may seem like nitpicking but the casual reader might get the sense that "daycare" costs $250,000 over a child's lifetime, instead of a fraction of that.
I agree, and I'll add that $25k sounds like maybe a San Fran or NYC price or something? Sending an infant to the best daycare in our flyover suburb costs around $10k/year, and it drops off from there. Though I suppose more of the audience might be in that $25k category.
I live in Colorado and most daycare centers around here are $1500-$2500/month. But there are also other options that are less. We take our kid to a woman who runs a daycare out of her house. We pay $55/day for 12 hours of care, about $880 per month.
Then there are informal babysitters who may charge as little as $10/hr because they are home with their own kid anyway.
The span of prices is huge and there seems to be huge market distortions going on that I haven't been able to figure out yet.
That's interesting, because where I live the top tier of places were all within maybe $50/month of each other when I checked. They would charge extra for 12 hours though (I think a standard day is 9 or 10 hours).
No idea know what the crappier daycare centers charge -- went to look at the one place that everyone told me is terrible and it doesn't even have a website.
I know a lot of people go with less formal arrangements though and I'm sure that has the potential to save money, though I don't know how much.
That sounds more reasonable to me. SF and NY have insane prices because of zoning regulations and delusional beliefs about the importance of 'good schools'.
As I've said before, I think that the healthiest way to do EA is to donate 10% of your money, then do whatever you want with the remaining 90%. Otherwise you will drive yourself crazy, not just when deciding to have kids but even when deciding to eg eat anything besides gruel.
One of the things people want to do with the remaining 90% of their money is have kids and pay for childcare, and I support this.
Beautifully said! I sometimes point people to https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/19/nobody-is-perfect-everything-is-commensurable/ to back up the "just donate 10%" argument but it would be nice to have something more concise and self-contained to point to.
I feel like this does not pan out empirically. I know quite a few EA people who donate considerably more than that, either in raw money or by accepting EA adjacent jobs that probably pay way less than they're worth. These people have never struck me as ill-adjusted.
For an extreme example, it was a long time ago, but I think I recall a partnered pair on Less Wrong that mentioned they try to live off the cheapest somewhat healthy foods possible, spending barely a few pounds per day, don't leave themselves much of an discretionary income, and literally donate everything else.
People like this exist. They're not crazy. Their lifestyles are probably still nicer than those of many humans currently alive. In certain third world countries, humans live in conditions considerably worse than this, and yet they're not going crazy over it en masse.
Comparing the behaviour of these wonderful people to mine, it would be the height of hypocrisy for me as an EA not to admit that they're the ones who are doing it right. They are morally better people than I am.
The reason I don't donate more isn't that doing so would drive me crazy, it's that I'm so incredibly tribal and selfish that my obscene first world luxuries weigh as heavily as children dying of malaria and the fate of all sapience in our future light cone in my mind.
Selling 10 people on 10% vs selling 1 on 99.9%
I think you can do the left without scaring off the right by focusing on the 10% message.
Pushing the 99.9% goal risks scaring off enough 10%ers that you might not even make a net gain doing so.
I'm not saying that the 10% target isn't what we should push for in the marketing. It seems well suited for that purpose.
But if someone donates more than that, I don't think this is an indication that they're crazy and don't have their life under control. I think it's wonderful.
In econ undergrad one of the concepts in our intro classes was the two-part tariff, in which a seller sets one price to get some money from a large portion of the market and then another higher price to get large amounts of money from a small portion of the market. I'm not sure that it would be easy to do, but one might imagine a post saying "if you still feel guilty after donating 10% of your income then donate 10% more until you feel better."
But what if you're the person reading the EA sermon and wondering why you aren't being inveighed against harder? If you're in the 10% of people who could be convinced to spend more than 10% of their income, it seems like you should allow yourself to be convinced to do so. Also, even if you can't imagine spending more than 10% of your income, what are the chances that reading more about EA thought convinced you to do so anyways? From the perspective of a concerned reader it seems like giving up when there are still higher moral planes in sight is wrong.
Would you accept the reverse? If I pay $25K I can legally go out and kill a few people?
I'm not sure the math works out on saving kids in developing nations, as grotesque as that may sound. What these countries, not to mention the rest of world, desperately need is not more people.
As a Third-Worlder this feels to me insane as well. Cannot every single person inside the US see the seething, teeming masses of people outside of your country yearning to get in? Crossing the border in such numbers sp that literal walls across the desert have to be built? Risking persecution, jail, deportation? People paying thousands of dollars to fake-marry a US citizen for a chance to move? The Green card lottery?
So are people in every single less rich, less developed, more unequal country not supposed to have kids as well?
Spot on
"So are people in every single less rich, less developed, more unequal country not supposed to have kids as well?"
That's exactly it: if the developing world wants to have the same lifestyle as the first world, it's just not doable. Westerners don't want to give up their cushy lives, so there have to be a lot fewer of the aspiring masses around. "I'm not having kids for the sake of the planet" sounds lovely, but it's not so lovely when you're living a lifestyle that can raise 400K for investment apart from the income you need to live on over your career. That money comes from *someplace* and it represents consumption of resources, the resources that the entire planet is competing for. For someone to have the kind of life where they can have that kind of income stream, someone else - a lot of someone elses -in other parts have to make sacrifices.
No, income (resulting from capitalism) represents value that you are providing to others. This is not simply generated out of thin air, where we only need to decide who gets to spend it.
It's not that simple, money isn't the same thing as utility/value. Every new person contributes to both supply and demand, and while supply usually makes others better off, demand (consuption) doesn't. You can the dating market as an example - introducing a new man into the dating market makes all women better off, but it makes other men worse off. So in a market already "oversaturated" with men, you could plausibly have the situation that a new man has a net negative impact on the dating population.
There is a bit of truth in this, but also a bit of "someone other than me should take care of the problems".
Imagine two societies: in one of them, middle class donates to EA causes, in the other, middle class does not donate to EA. Which society will have more billionaires donating to EA?
My assumption is that the billionaires are more likely to do it if someone else does it, too. First, because people copy each other. Second, because some of those billionaires may come from a middle-class background and keep the habit.
The person who can set aside 400K is typically going to pay more taxes than is spend on them by the government, so their existence will typically enable more non-productive consumption & their own consumption will be below production.
Of course, this is not the only thing you can look at. There are also all kinds of positive and negative side effects of consumption and production.
Adding 100 men and 100 women to a heterosexual dating market makes everyone better off, because you're more likely to get a good match.
(This assumes that we are bringing in people to work, and not to just receive a UBI or welfare.)
Unless having more choice has negative effects, like creating unreasonable expectations.
>That money comes from *someplace* and it represents consumption of resources
This is what anti-capitalists actually believe.
I think that you are falsely equating all anti-capitalists.
AFAIK Marxists believe that a labor components is reflected in the value of products.
I am surely somewhat overgeneralizing, but I think I'm still mostly right wrt Marxists.
I believe Marx wrote that a product's value is a result of the labor put into it. But that doesn't seem to operationalize in any way other than to argue that the rightful owner of a product is the laborer. Otherwise, a price system would still be essential to any tracking of resource allocation, and once you grant that the material inputs to production have prices that must be tracked, it starts to look a lot like capitalism again.
I actual fact, the developing world is rapidly getting richer, and catching up with the developed world. It'll take a generation or two to complete, and I suppose trends can change, but that is what is happening across the planet.
Here is the share of the global economy by assorted countries in 1980 and 2018[1]:
US: 21% (1980) 21% (2018)
Japan: 8% (1980) 5% (2018)
Germany: 7% (1980) 4% (2018)
Brazil: 1.7% (1980) 1.9% (2018)
China: 1.4% (1980) 14% (2018)
Nigeria: 0.47% (1980) 0.40% (2018)
Bangladesh: 0.13% (1980) 0.28% (2018)
Basically, except for however you say Wirtschaftswunder in Chinese, very little has changed in the past 40 years. To be sure, the average wealth of Nigeria today is considerably better than it was 40 years ago, but *relative* to the wealthiest nations, nothing much has changed.
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[1] https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/rankings/gdp_share/
Well not deliberately, at least. I just picked the US and China, for obvious reasons, then an Asian First World nation (Japan, as it turned out, but I could've picked S. Korea I guess), then a famously poor and large Asian (Bangladesh) and African (Nigeria) country. If you think there's a better selection, by all means propose it.
I mean, that's not a fair summary of that data. There are 3 developed countries on that list, and their GDP share changed by 0%, -37% and -43%. Those are some pretty big changes for Japan and Germany, and a notable reduction (17%) in the total share of the three developed countries.
On the other hand, the 4 developing countries increased by 12%, 900%, -17.5% and 115% (and their total increased by 348%, which is dominated by china, as you said.)
Overall, I'd say that this data is really compatible with LarsP's assertion that the developing world is catching up. The share of the developed countries is diminishing by a lot, and the share by the developing countries has increased.
I gave you the link at the bottom so you can go pick a representative sample for yourself. But yeah I think it's fair. The relative changes are pretty unimportant here, because for anyone other than the big heavyweights the absolute numbers are tiny, and who knows whether the difference between 1980 and 2018 is even accurately measureable?
My main points are:
1. The US consumed 1/5 of global GDP 40 years ago, and it still does.
2. China, wow!
3. I rather suspect because the percents total to 100, China's surge came at the expense of Europe and Japan, which explains those decreases -- but even so, those decreases are not enough to knock Europe out of roughly the same positions they were in 40 years ago.
4. Brazil was a small fraction of the world economy then, it still is.
5. Nigeria and Bangladesh, both very large Third World Countries, had a miniscule slice of the world GDP then, and they do now, 40 years later. If you want argue their crumbs are 50% bigger, be my guest, but the idea that they're going to be "catching up" any time this (or the next) generation is clearly absurd.
Is percent of the world economy a good way to view whether they are rapidly getting richer? If the US and India are both growing quickly, India will see huge gains in basic standard of living, while the US will see modest gains to standard of living and some previously impossible things (including a social safety net, but also a tech industry).
India went from 1.37% to 2.74%, approximately double their share of the global economy, while the global economy grew significantly as well. Worldwide per capita GDP was just over $2,000 in 1980, but was almost $11,000 in 2018. Real wealth for Indians grew 10X over 40 years. I would take that as LarsP being correct. Some (China!) obviously grew much faster, while others grew much slower. Overall, the developing world is catching up with the West, if slowly, but more importantly is seeing huge gains in absolute wealth.
No, of course not, and I would actually agree they are rapidly getting richer. But the question was not absolute status, but relative, the argument was they were "catching up" -- which means they are getting richer *faster* than the First World. For that purpose, the relative share of the GDP does indeed matter.
Put it this way: the "poor" in the United States right now are fabulously rich compared to the poor of the 15th century, right? Probably even compared to the nobility of the 15th century, in absolute terms (food supply, entertainment, travel possibilities, widgetry, creature comforts). But we don't call them "rich" because it's their *relative* situation compared to everyone else that matters. Same thing here. Nigeria is richer than it was, in absolute terms, but in relative terms -- nope, not really. No evidence I can see of any "catching up" beyond NGO's typical cheery blather, only matched by the optimists who see peace in the Middle East Real Soon Now.
American GDP has grown despite our falling consumption of material resources. Becoming a rich country is basically a matter of accumulating human resources, and human resources are largely unconnected from any specific resource costs. Technology will continue to increase human wealth while decreasing the resource intensity of production. Development isn't a straightforward path, but it's unlikely that the developing countries of today will face as much pollution and resource consumption as did the previous generation of industrializing Asian/PacRim countries.
"That money comes from *someplace* and it represents consumption of resources, the resources that the entire planet is competing for"
Actually... I would argue that the net effect of first-world resource consumption has been enormously positive for the poorer countries of the world, given that many of the poorest nations have economies that are largely dependent on commodity exports (from agriculture, lumber, mining, etc.) If the richer nations of the world were to all adopt carbon-neutral minimalist lifestyles tomorrow, the economies of Africa and the Middle East would mostly collapse (with, y'know, minor side-effects like mass starvation and civil war.)
I can agree in the abstract that consumption for consumption's sake is a pretty perverse way to measure social progress and in a perfect world we'd find other ways to fund the development of the global south, but... as it stands it turns out that trickle-down-economics does make a certain sense at the global level.
If I could only give a kid the life that they would get in the Central African Republic, I would want one even less, yeah.
I'm not sure why you thought I wouldn't say yes to this.
But if that life was the life you had had till now, would you feel that way? Impossible to be sure, perhaps, but the way things usually play out suggests that someone living that life is less intimidated by it than we Westerners are, and more hopeful about obtaining a better life for their children one way or another. Hope springs eternal, realistic or not. Sometimes I think our psychological problem, here in the West, is that we've made it to where everyone else wants to be and found we're nonetheless capable of being deeply unhappy, and the idea that climbing higher would fulfill us becomes less and less believable... thus we have less hope.
Eh, what do I know?
It is true that there are lots of them, and yet many of them are also operating on extremely false ideas of what it will be like here, and seem to think everyone in the US is rich and lives like what they see in American movies/TV/cultural products. I have known plenty of immigrants who came here and were *extremely* disappointed at the reality, and also talk constantly at how cold, individualistic, materialistic, non-social Americans are.
Is it better to be a person of standing and status, embedded in a community, in a place with a lower standard of living, or a total no one at the bottom of society in a rich country? Not so sure for most people it's the latter.
Last, I think it's clear that absolute wealth and living standards (rather than relative wealth or sense of increasing standards), has a very weak correlation with sense of well being and happiness. I agree that living standards in the US, even for poor people, are amazing now. Yet the current crop of youngsters seem to be more miserable than ever.
Within the US I made the choice to live in a much smaller community and make a lot less money in order to enjoy what I consider the better parts of life. When I hear rich people (even upper middle class as with many programmers who frequent this blog) talk about their lives, they are often devoid of family and living space. I have an abundance of both, at the cost of making 30-40% of what I could be making in various cities. On the other hand, I can afford to buy a nice house in the suburbs on a single income while my wife takes care of the kids, the house, and connecting us with the community more.
I am saddened when I hear of a family where both parents work, the kids are being raised by a daycare for most of their awake time, and the family feels like they are barely making ends meet - despite making $200k+.
These people may be disappointed in how it worked out for them, but in many many cases their children have far higher upward mobility and opportunity than they would in their parents' home country. Look at Americans of Indian descent. They are one of the most successful groups in the US, and while there is a selection bias of who from Indian comes to and becomes successful in the US, there is no shortage of stories of kids whose parents owned a restaurant or worked in a convenience store who have gone on to become upper middle-class in one of the richest nations on earth.
If those immigrants were childless, then maybe they would have been better off staying in their home country and being in a community of people they felt more connected with. Maybe somewhat ironically, in their home community they would probably be more pressured to marry and have a family than they would in the US.
Alas, due to the lemon market, the option to real-marry a US citizen for a chance to move is off the table as well.
I would actually agree there are still a couple of Third-World nations that could stand to trim their fertility rates somewhat, but birthrates are actually declining toward sub-replacement at a global level.
I think all those things are pretty manageable. I guess it depends on where your live though. My kids shared a bedroom until the oldest was in middle school so we could have managed with a small two bed room house or apartment (my mother in a family of 3 girls grew up in 1500 sq ft home). And at least in my area/state public school is just fine for both primary school and college. If you want to go really cheap on schooling you can do two years of community college before transferring to State U.
Day care is more of a challenge, but lots of people manage on one income. My wife planned to stay at home once our kids were born but her career was going so well that we decided that she should keep working. Our philosophy was even if we spent 100% of her after tax salary on childcare before the kids were in school we would come out ahead in the long run.
And like Bryan Caplan has written about, most of the cost of having kids is totally self imposed by doing things that don't make much of a difference but everyone thinks you have to do.
I agree it's manageable. But not everyone's goal is a "manageable" life. I've noticed the daunting notion of meeting these expenses, living further from work in a less-nice neighborhood, living with less space, putting kids in less-good schools, etc. has turned some people I know away from having kids (or from having more kids). It makes some sense.
Yeah everyone has their own priorities. I just think the tradeoffs are often exaggerated and the payoff to having kids is hard to imagine until you have them.
The problem for me is that the cost of having kids is obvious and quantifiable and the benefit seems very fuzzy, unpredictable and unquantifiable.
"the benefit seems very fuzzy, unpredictable and unquantifiable"
Did you grow up in an orphanage? If you have experience being in a family, knowing your own parents, grandparents, etc... is it really so speculative??
Lots of people do not particularly enjoy their families. I know plenty of people that don't even speak to their family members, often for what seem to me to be petty reasons. Don't imagine that this is always because of abuse or some serious reason...some people just don't particularly like or get along with or have fun with their family members, for no reason other than just having incompatible personality types.
I've always been curious about the personality dimension of caring a lot about family, as this seems to be something varies a lot, person to person. But I've never seen research on it. I've known so many people who say things like that they don't like kids until they met *their* niece or nephew or kid or whatever, like merely being related somehow opened some new door of caring and empathy. Honestly I don't feel that way at all, I've never cared more or less about people related to me than people who aren't.
There is no benefit, if you mean like a return on investment or something. Children are a net negative to your lifespan, your fitness, your economics, and the amount of gray hair you have and how early you get it. They're not a consumer good, or investment, at all.
Children are a work project. They're something you do, like build an airplane by hand, create a work of art, climb Kilimanjaro. It's a question of what you want to *do* in your brief allotment of threescore years and ten before you go back to the eternal darkness.
Sure, you want to enjoy yourself a bunch, but most people have goals other than sheer maximization of sensual pleasure -- they want to accomplish something, make a mark, build something that will endure beyond them, that sort of thing. Bearing and rearing kids, sending emissaries to the future that you have personally trained from birth, is one such project.
Obviously not for everybody, any more than climbing Kilimanjaro is, but it's attractive to a lot of people because it's about the only situation in ordinary life in which you would be trusted with the complete training of a human being. An awesome responsibility, and power, and you don't need to pass a license test* or work your way up to a corner office or be fabulously rich to do it. It will, however, cost you most of your nonworking hours, a substantial chunk of your income, and a great deal of worry at times.
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* Which of course some find regrettable.
I wonder how long it will be before social services gets called on poorer people for "abusing" their children by requiring them to share a bedroom.
Plenty of things that were normal when I was growing up are already "abusive", such as (gasp) requiring your children to walk to school rather than driving them there. Not coincidentally, living up to the new requirements tends to increase parental costs.
Wait is kids walking to school counted as abuse? A quick google shows a lot of posts about anti-vaxxers verbally assaulting mask wearing children walking to school but that's pretty much it.
I have seen several stories of hyperactive police picking up kids out playing alone. Usually it is at the park not walking to school though.
https://www.cnn.com/2015/04/13/living/feat-maryland-free-range-parenting-family-under-investigation-again/index.html
There are some incidences published involving kids taking the bus to school and the parents being investigated:
https://www.crossroadslaw.ca/blog/when-are-children-old-enough-to-use-public-transit-without-adult-supervision/
To clarify, by "bus" I meant "public transit".
Read up on the work by Lenore Skenazy, she documents a number of circumstances where, for example, the parent has their child walk to school and the parent is fined for child endangerment.
As a result of these incidents and her work a number of states are passing "free range parenting" laws that state it is not child abuse for a parent to do a number of things based on the parent's assessment of the child's maturity and the risk of the situation.
What alternate reality do you live in where the discourse on child abuse is not heavily weighted against labelling parents as abusers?
My impression is that in practice the culturally middle class investigators have great difficulty seeing abuse from people like themselves, whether or not it's present, but find it quite easy to see abuse among people who can't afford a culturally (and financially) middle class lifestyle.
FWIW, a distant acquaintance of mine just got given a choice between relinquishing custody to her ex, if he'd take the child, or giving the child up to social services. I don't know all the details, but this was precipitated by the child being injured in some way that required a cast. I have zero idea whether or not the acquaintance was in fact negligent or worse. But these things do happen, and the one thing I do know is that she's poor. The acquaintance and her ex are both in the USA, in different states.
Possibly relevant: at least half my elementary/middle school classmates had at least one broken bone before we all reached high school, without AFAIK anyone being investigated for abuse. But this was a different era and a different country; also we were attending a private school, i.e. most of our parents had above average income/wealth.
My impression is exactly the opposite. Middle-class parents are hounded and harassed by CPS for the tiniest things. Meanwhile, lower-class parents are beating and abusing their kids and CPS does nothing. I have heard stories of children killed by abusive parents and there are facts like "CPS was ordered not to visit the household because of the risk of harm to the investigator"!!
Is it possible that CPS simply acts randomly -- often does not act at all, then at a random occassion horribly overreacts -- so the stories of both kind can be simultaneously true?
If "CPS was ordered not to visit the household because of the risk of harm to the investigator" is true and common then it turns out that being sufficiently violent can be an efficient strategy for child abusers.
I just find it fascinating that somehow our ancestors going back to the literal Stone Age had children in much worse circumstances. The counterargument of no birth control notwithstand - birth control has actually existed since before Christ, including one plant harvested to extinction for that very reason - it's just curious that modern folks place such a premium on comfort.
That said, not sure I want to encourage people who are going to treat their kids with contempt to procreate. Quite the dilemma.
You're committing the survivors' fallacy, plenty of people through history no doubt saw the immense suffering the world and refused to have kids, the fundamental insight of anti-natalism is pretty simple to derive for any mind reasonably attentive to the problem of evil. Maybe not stone age denizens, but at least one arabic philosopher in the 1200s or so lived and died by anti-natalism, so it couldn't be that much of a modern philosophy.
Your ancestors did have kids, but that doesn't say anything about the attitudes of all people who lived in their times, only them. Just like how in, say, the 25th century, descendents of current natalists will scoff at the anti-natalists of their time and remind them that "our ancestors in the 21st had kids despite everything". That's indeed true, but it ignores all the 21st century anti-natalists who were affected by the "everything" and didn't have children, saving countless millions of their progeny.
The thing about anti-natalism is that the lives saved by it were never born in the first place, they exist solely as brain patterns in the mind of their would-be parent who considered what world they would live in and decided not to have them, so there is no monument or observable effects to its decision. But that's not a problem, after all there is no monument to those who prevented wars or dismantled bombs, they prevented the disaster before it happened and thus it never happened, not surprising.
I'm really not seeing any fallacies in what I said. I pointed out that
1) we all exist in order to be having this conversation, and that involved a lot of people implicitly or explicitly wanting at least some kids
2) birth control has in fact been in existence and known to people for millennia, and
[implied] 3) there has been no distinct widespread anti-natal movement in the past.
If your argument is that there has in fact been [3] an anti-natal movement of significance I'm curious to hear about it. Rome fell in part because they weren't procreating enough but the modern anti-natal movement centers on ills to the planet, the individuals involved or both, concepts which as recently as in my parents' lifetimes would have been seen as ridiculous even in a more modern, less religious American society much less the overwhelming God-centered (however you'd like to define God/gods) ones of the past.
If anything, it sounds like the fallacy committed is Argument From Silence.
"Then I counted as lucky those who die young rather than those who die old, but luckier than both are those who are not born, who have not seen the evil that is done under the sun." Ecclesiastes 4: 2 -3 (quoted from memory)
There's actually quite a lot of praise singing (awards, movies, etc) for Stanislav Petrov, and a somewhat lesser amount for Vasily Arkhipov.
It doesn't seem like there was any sizable anti-natal movement before modernity. For those who were anti-natalist, they probably didn't anticipate the industrial revolution and its consequences and thus underestimated how good things would be for their descendants.
It also seems to be the case that people have fewer children at higher standards of living and more at lower standards of living. Anti-natalism, like suicide, seems to crop up mostly among the affluent and among the literally-starving-to-death poor. It seems like most other moral actions have a much stronger relationship between expected utilitarian benefit and how likely people are to do them.
I have a hard time understanding how anyone can impute another person's utilitarian value as less than zero (except maybe for people with specific and uncommon diseases). For one it seems hard to draw a line where the vast majority of human lives haven't been negatives. For another it seems like that would license you to kill very large swathes of people if you thought their lives were negatives. I'm sure that antinatalists have a neat explanation of how killing people is wrong but convincing people not to have kids isn't, but the moral weight of the two actions seems more similar than different and I don't clearly see why one would be permissable and not another.
I for my part accept the repugnant conclusion and simply say that all human lives that have been lived up until this point have been valuable for creating the artistic, cultural, and academic cornucopia that has been passed down to us.
I don't know whether it's true, but Germaine Greer's _Sex and Destiny_ says that human societies are like candles. Sub-fertile elites burning themselves away at the top and drawing lower status fertile people up into the elite.
Just out of curiosity, which plant are you referring to?
Probably silphium.
Even if they are, an article challenging this reason is worthwhile.
Personally, my belief is the most important cause of declining birthrates is being in school from age 18 to 23. It seems like people's urges to have children are strongest around that age and in the early 30s. Since having kids during uni effectively puts your education on hold, it seems prudent to put off kids until later. When later comes, the urges aren't nearly as strong.
I've noticed some people don't like this theory as it implies we are animals like any other.
I don't plan on having children ever, and not because of climate change, so may I go on a little tangent here?
You make an interesting point here that the 60 ton carbon cost per child is not actually calculated only for the child, but for their descendants too. I didn't know that.
So does it mean that not having children is NOT the best decision one can make, in an environmental sense? I always thought deciding not having kids had more impact than deciding to recycle, or to use public transport etc.
See https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/carbon-costs-quantified , especially footnote 25, for Much More Than You Wanted To Know on this topic.
Thanks!
It probably still comes out ahead of recycling, which may well be worse for the environment (lots of energy required to turn plastic back into new plastic, even assuming that it doesn't accidently end up in the ocean while on the way to the recycling plant in Malaysia), but it's hard to really know since we're comparing current life choices to hypothetical future life choices in a (presumably) more environmentally friendly economy.
Recycling glass, recycling aluminum, recycling cardboard, and recycling plastic probably work out very differently. I would thing the first two are very good, and cardboard often good, but plastic seems bad.
Definitely agree that "it depends", aluminium and other metals recycle very well (the way you can tell is that people will pay money for scrap metal), and broken glass is a pretty good substitute for sand. Not sure on paper and cardboard, but I think it's generally easier to work with than turning wood into paper, although there's a loss of quality every time (which isn't too much of a problem since there are many uses for lower grades, it just can't be done endlessly). It's very hard to find any good information on this though, because it's just assumed that recycling = good.
I am increasingly concerned that plastic recycling (or at least, failed attempts to get people in Asia to do it for us) may actually have done more damage to the environment than just burying it in a hole.
My understanding is that recycling glass is a debacle. Some types of glass you can't recycle at all so they just get landfilled (which of course is fine, in the U.S.). The other types are extremely resource intensive to recycle, much moreso than just creating new glass.
This is true. Some types of glass are worth recycling, if you can gather enough of it that has a low enough processing cost. Glass is pretty cheap to make from raw materials, though, so anything that raises the cost of recycling (including potentially residential collection, but especially impurities) makes it cost prohibitive pretty quickly.
My municipality recently stopped taking glass for recycling which really bothers me. It's heavy, not biodegradable and not incinerable.
It is also perfectly harmless to just bury it in the ground though, for all the reasons you mentioned, so there's no reason to be too bothered.
Ultimately, glass becomes silicon dioxide again, of which the world has plenty. And in the meantime, no harm done.
I actually tried to estimate the net externality from having a child almost fifty years ago, back before climate change worries but at a time when the orthodoxy was that population growth was a terrible problem. I was unable to sign the sum.
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Laissez-Faire_In_Popn/L_F_in_Population.html
Current climate hysteria looks a lot less persuasive for those of us who observed the last round, when population growth was going to destroy the world, with Ehrlich seriously claiming that it was already too late to prevent mass famine happening in the 1970's, with hundred of millions dying. That was an extreme view but taken seriously as within the range of the then current orthodoxy, an orthodoxy pushed with at least as much confidence as this one.
What actually happened since was the precise opposite of the prediction.
I agree with this. I used to argue with my father about the same thing. Now, 35 years later, every single modelled projection of doom has been seriously, almost comically wrong, and I find myself arguing with my children about the likelihood of the apocalypse.
And life is actually better for all of us.
It’ll probably get worse next year though.
Or the year after.
Or the year after that. Etc. If you don't peg the limit of your prediction, then *eventually* you might be right. Or if you don't count your failed predictions and only the correct prediction, you will be right.
Really? Previous climate predictions held that there would be routine summer sea ice in the arctic until the 2050s. Based on observations, this estimate has been brought forward by a couple of decades. Even this summer scientists were surprised by the ferocity of the US west coast heat waves, and are revising their models to incorporate this new (and more pessimistic) data.
In 2007, Tim Flannery stated unequivocally that not only would rainfall be reduced by 20% across Australia, but what rain did fall wouldn’t reach and fill dams because the ground would be so dry due to elevated temperatures. Four years later multiple dams overflowed and dozens of people were killed in huge floods. This too was blamed on climate change despite the floods being well within historical limits. He also predicted Perth would become a ghost metropolis, but the population has increased by a third since he said that, and the Swan River is still flowing serenely through the city and all the swimming pools are full.
Some predictions will inevitably be proven correct. Most have not been. Polar bear numbers are increasing, the Northwest Passage remains closed, one million climate refugees have not eventuated, S Pacific atolls are growing rather than being flooded, there has been a reduction rather than growth in deaths from tropical diseases, wildfires are actually decreasing in number and intensity, cyclones and hurricanes are causing less damage per capita, floods kill less people.
Here’s a prediction: There will be a measurable increase in excess deaths due to cold in Europe this winter. This can be attributed to power shortages arising from over reliance on wind and solar causing price inflation for traditional fuels used for heating. All of this is happening while Germany’s CO2 emissions are rising due to their idiotic move away from nuclear power. All of that is due to the government failing to resist environmental activism over the last decade.
Climate emergency mitigation policies will be responsible for more deaths than climate change ever will. Unfortunately the terms of the discussion are now so morally warped that the answer is just to do more stupid stuff faster (Stop fracking! Close nuclear plants! Burn wood pellets! Subsidise electric cars!) and, by the way, stop having children.
Whenever I see something argued using only one hand, I, as an economist, always have to wonder about the other hand. What would the missing child whose absence saved the world from 60 tons of carbon cost in terms of how the child might have improved the world? It seems wrong to me to argue certain costs when the benefits are uncertain. Makes the costs look less certain.
I agree and think looking at only costs and not benefits is a mistake and makes the argument for having children for people in rich countries weaker than it should be. People looking at the sea level rise in SF and NYC are probably ignoring what may happen in Bangladesh in 100 years. If we increase the population in the US (even Texas) through more births or immigration from countries with lower economic growth that means higher US and world GDP, more money and more minds to work on bringing solutions like fracking tech, for both natural gas as a coal substitute ( which has been a large cause of American CO2 emissions reductions as well as advanced geothermal, carbon capture, new nuclear power generation tech and possibly future dike building robots, geo-forming and as yet unimagined technology.
Humans are not a problem, they are problem solvers. The IPCC also focus only on problems and map out current emission trends and assume we will not have the will or wherewithal to reduce or eliminate them before they overwhelm us. We need more wealth and brainpower not less. If the proverbial frog’s pot is warming slow enough then maybe there’s time to have many tadpoles and maybe displace enough water to spillover and put out the fire.
My question to everyone abstaining from procreation for the purpose of saving the planet is: whom are you saving the planet FOR?
I am not one of the people you asked, but I think the answer might very well be "humanity". I don't think anyone seriously believes that any such campaign will stop everyone from having children; the point is to reduce the increase in population, not end the human race.
With the caveat that I am not one of those people: some of them want to save the planet for the nonhuman life that lives on it, sometimes valuing that much more than human civilization.
And yet human population keeps concentrating itself in cities and wilding the rest of the world. Hard to say that population growth is bad for nonhuman life.
Wilding the rest of the world with how much pollution produced by those cities?
Plus, food production doesn't take place in cities, and it would be interesting for someone to run the numbers on how environmentally bad agriculture is to feed our current or an even greater population.
Partly for itself, partly for the inevitable people who are going to be there anyway because most humans seem to value reproduction highly.
Kittens and puppies and other cute little animals.
Let the natural selection take over. Anyone who is ideologically brainwashed enough to consider kids as ' pollution ' shouldn't be having kids anyway.
My god!
How can you live with yourself, failing to bring into existence the 1*10^10 possible children you might have? Such moral depravity!
I mean, I'm not. I think it's weird to say "It's global warming" instead of a more general "Shit's fucked, yo".
But, as they say, two wrongs don't make a right.
When the opposite direction is a nonsensical argument about the value of a nonexistent person that deserves to be mocked.
Good point haha
So annoying to see people equate the moral value of putative future lives with that of actual current lives
Good point. I mean, unless we're talking about people in the past, e.g. those dumbasses who allowed chattel slavery to exist in the United States for 85 years until it took 500,000 lives to put an end to it and we're *still* paying for it. Didn't those fools understand they were living in the past, and should be much more concerned about our lives now (which are of course not putative) than their lives then? Yeesh.
I feel like there's a misunderstanding here
I don't mean that the people who will be alive in 100 years should matter less than we do
(that might not be inconcevable because of hyperbolic discounting but that's not what I'm talking about)
I'm saying that someone not being born is not as bad as someone dying.
And so, protecting living people is more valuable than making new lives.
I feel like that's what we talk about when we distinguish between murder and abortion early in the pregnancy (which most people here do I'm assuming)
Or even contraception
About the word "putative" maybe I misused it (not a native speaker)
I meant to refer to "lives who might theoretically exist in the future of might theoretically have existed in the past" not to "lives that will exist in the future" or "lives that did exist in the past"
Also, would you care to explain the link with slavery? I don't get it
> How can you live with yourself, failing to bring into existence the 1*10^10 possible children you might have?
I used all the saved carbon to create another universe.
Not sure about that
Do you concern yourself with the value of James Bond's existence or Popeye's?
I exist now. Children that I don't choose to create are and have always been fictional. Bad analogy.
Willingness to take ethical arguments seriously and make sacrifices according to their conclusions is not a trait I want purged from the gene pool. (Though, this is just for the sake of argument. In practice, the time scales involved here are too small to have an evolutionary impact before this particular ethical argument is made irrelevant one way or another.)
This. The people most concerned about the future of the planet are the people whose genes and nurture we will most need in the future.
Actually, that might be a good thing. The amount of horror and harm that humans have piled up when they do massive things for philosophical or soi-disant ethical reasons is disturbing. Stalin thought he was doing great and necessary things for the Workers of the World when he starved 30 million Ukrainians during the Holodomor. Treblinka was a way to rid the world of irredeemable evil, according to its planners. We have people today who would cheerfully nuke Beijing because they think it is a source of malign moral influence, and not because there is any direct harm to be avoided by doing so.
When people behave more like horses or wolves, and act in accordance with their basic drives, moderated by the age-old social restraints that come with the approval or disapproval of their immediate family and community, they seem much less likely to cause widespread evil. It's when they become urbanized, organized, sophisticated, and indulge in ideological and philosophical passions to Set Things Right that they seem more willing to contemplate the breaking of a million or two eggs to make their ethical omelet.
Non-serious idea: monasteries and universities as a societal immune system, locking away the ethically inclined, protecting the rest of society from their predation
I'm in general agreement, but I think the Mongols weren't driven by ideology.
I wonder about Stalin, on a day-to-day basis was he consciously thinking about the greater good, or just running the routines that would keep him in power and diminish the likelihood of a coup, while also settling scores in general?
Does a tree falling in the forest make a noise if there's no one there to hear it? Similar question.
Sure, but no one will attempt to use a dead tree to rationalise their political views.
Stalin's regime placed absolute power in the hands of a group of executives for whom human life was a secondary consideration, and then isolated those executives from society.
If he was acting for the greater good, then let's be really careful about creating a supra-national executive to force change in climate policies and removing them from direct accountability for the lives of the people who will be affected.
If it was just power politics gone mad, then Stalin's regime is not necessarily an argument against a supra-national executive to fix the climate - we just need to be careful about its design.
My point is that Stalin's actual secret thoughts are somewhat immaterial, in that what he did is what essentially everybody in such a position, atop such a power structure, appears to do. I can think of very, very few men with dictatorial powers and a Sacred Mission To Improve Things who have not ended up with a horrible pile of skulls. Franco? Pinochet -- at least his pile of skulls was fairly modest, I guess. Why do we care about their inner thoughts? Even if they *are* different, it doesn't ever seem to lead to different outcomes, and outcomes are what matter.
Given Stalin offered to resign several times from General-Secretary and did promote people to be his successor (one guy was an alcoholic who died despite Stalin begging him to lay off the vodka), as well as doing things like complaining to Beria about promoting too many Georgians versus other nationalities in the USSR, and arguaably the 'doctor's purge' was to provide a place for new leadership after Stalin died theres a strong likelyood he was operating at least under the greater good sentiment.
Hitler and Mao are good examples of Good Intentions; Stalin I'm less sure about. I know you say "does it matter" to another similar reply, but I think it does here because someone who only claimed to do things for ethical reasons isn't the sort of person who'd be convinced one way or another by this essay.
The most energetic environmental activists claim the future of life on earth is at stake, and therefore insist that a new form of government is required to avoid this. Almost as a side note, we are asked to consider whether or not we should have children. To save the planet.
Carl Pham’s point is that absolute power corrupts absolutely. This is probably true, but it’s worth thinking about how these dictators came to hold that power in the first place. I maintain that the utopian mindset is a necessary precondition for the kind of governments that commit genocide.
Dunno, did king Leopold II have utopian thoughts about Congo?
I haven’t read much about it, but probably not. It seems like a lot of misery and death for no apparent reason or gain for Belgium. Incompetence plus ignorance plus hubris?
Absolutely. Anyone who believes perfection is readily achievable in this vale o' tears is just walking around wearing a giant "PSYCHOPATHS! EXPLOIT ME!" sandwich board that is unfortunately readily visible only to psychopaths and related scoundrels.
Well honestly I replied with more smart-assery than reason, so sorry about that. Sure, it's interesting to muse about what exactly was going on in Uncle Joe's head, in a sort of gruesome psychological post-mortem kind of way. I guess he combined phenomenal "emotional intelligence" as they call it today - since he was reportedly deeply trusted by everybody, came across very well, as a sincerely kind and thoughtful soul -- with the blackest of actual hearts. An antisocial to define the word, certainly. You wonder what kind of weird perturbation in the neural circuitry would allow that kind of brain to actually exist and function, kind of like how you wonder how idiot savants do their thing.
One nonobvious takeaway I draw from this, and related smaller scale phenomena I have observed myself, is that the most charismatic people are all too often antisocial bastards at heart. I tend to keep my distance from people who come across as *so* charming and warm, never impatient, never angry, never embarassed or mean. It's too perfect, and it brings a hint that there may be something really nasty behind an exterior *so* polished and disciplined (else why go to the work of maintaining it?) I prefer people who exhibit enough of the human failings -- pride, sloth, the usual crowd -- that I can be more certain they *are* human.
There's this cluster of theories claiming that psychopathy and "normalcy" co-evolved in humans. Psychopaths are purportedly parasites which have adapted to prey on normies, and come with an appropriate set of traits for this role, like the often noted ability to effortlessly charm people and the apparent lack of conscience or empathy. So good ol' uncle Joe wouldn't be an extreme aberration under this view, more like a perverse perfection instead.
The Soviet government, even under Stalin operated under a collective method of leadership, so while certain events will certainly be lessene or avoided altogether, there will be some things similar. Example: Trotsky won't wreck the army, and collectivization might go slower, but he might go full Eugenics on the Soviet population (he argued a socialist north america would go eugenics, but not in a racialized way like the Germans but for the benefit of all races)
I agree. And I wonder if I overlooked the word "love" in all the comments so far or if really no one uttered it. A human can love a lot without begetting kids but doing good loving and "breeding sinners" is, well, something.
The Holodomor did not starve 30 million Ukrainians. Only a few million people died in the USSR, and that was also within the RSFSR and Kazak SSR. And a significant portion of the cause was from a bad harvest, and Stalin did send aid to the Ukrainian SSR.
Speciation - going from dinosaur to bird, tree-climbing ape to tool-wielding man - takes a long time. But within-species effects - e.g., going from a bolder man to a more careful man - can happen within very short timescales, even a single generation. Especially with strong selection pressures, you'll see outsized impacts in very few generations. The classic example is the Black Death; it appeared to kill indiscriminately, but even very subtle protection from certain genes led it to cull in a way that left scars in our genomes today. I don't think that climate-inspired child-abstinence is going to have any kind of serious impact on that level. But don't underestimate how easy it would be to lose most of our fundamentalists (yes, I think that is the right word for "people who make sacrifices based on their ethics").
Don't worry, that kind of trait will live on in the devoutly religious.
I see that as a positive, though your mileage may vary.
I agree. But willingness to be stampeded by wildly exaggerated popular scare campaigns might be.
> Willingness to take ethical arguments seriously and make sacrifices according to their conclusions is not a trait I want purged from the gene pool.
I feel like the Catholic Church is doing a great job on this one, by making the argument that unprotected vaginal intercourse within marriage is the only ethical way to ejaculate. People who take that ethical argument seriously are likely to have a lot of children.
Depends if they use rhythm, which the church approves of. It's not reliable enough to make casual sex safe but should be sufficient to hold down the number of children to about what the couple wants.
Wouldn't that same argument also justify any form of political terrorism?
I'm willing to go to prison/be executed in order to stop $OUTGROUP from having political power?
This is as silly as the argument that says “any employer that holds X against you in the interview isn’t an employer you want to work for anyway”. It’s a nice sour grapes rationalization if not bothering to fix something that could actually be fixed.
Having worked for a few of those companies, I think those conclusions are correct.
Right right, because ideologies are genetic. That's how evolution works.
That is, in fact, how evolution works. Political beliefs are highly heritable and twin studies confirm this.
A quick google search shows studies that attribute at most up to 50% of some ideologies to genetics, and frankly the numbers change a lot depending on the topic.
Raising children is by an overwhelming majority of opinion the most fulfilling and important thing you can do with your life. To choose to not do so on the pretext of potentially reducing the small risk of future hardship due to climate change by an immeasurably tiny amount, would be a mistake.
Besides, why save the planet if no one is around to enjoy it? If the answer is to allow other people to enjoy it, then why them and not you. The meaning of life is literally to propagate your genes. The satisfaction you might occasionally feel that hundreds of other children from poor countries who live their lives completely untroubled by any feelings of responsibility for the climate will be massively offset by your loneliness as you face solitary dotage.
A human failing to have offspring is not a reproducing strategy for the gene.
Evolution selects for individual reproductive success, not species success. Helping your close kin rear children may be selected for, helping random peers isn't. The fact that some men fail to have children is no more evidence that they don't have the trait of wanting children than the fact that some people starve to death is evidence that they don't have the trait of wanting to eat.
Indeed sperm are cheap, eggs (or more precisely uteruses) are expensive, so it's good to have way more men competing for the available uteruses than can succeed -- you get the advantage of competition that enhances short-term flexibility in the species, a major concern in a species with as long a generation span as ours. We (men) are just lucky our species hasn't gone as far as honeybees, with 1000 males for every fertile female :(
Humans are not "near eusocial". Men failed to have children often because some more dominant males prevented them from doing so, not because they took on some helper role.
The effective population size is much smaller for males than females. So Y-chromosomal Adam is a much more recent common ancestor than mitochondrial Eve.
If you think about monogamy, it was a way to make sure more men had the ability to reproduce by taking men out of the market once they got married, as opposed to one man impregnating many women.
That's evidence of a reverse-dominance hierarchy among humans, not eusociality.
Failing to have children is a net negative for the individual, but sufficiently vigorous competition that only 50% of competitors succeed is a big positive for the tribe and the species -- and, of course, for the victorious genes. So it persists. Same reason rabbits are programmed to breed well past the carrying capacity of their ecosystem, and a good 99% or more of amphibious or aquatic small creatures born of eggs do not survive to adulthood. Mother Nature doesn't give a damn about the individual, evolution drives the survival of the *fittest* and to hell with the rest. As long as the death or failure of the rest enhances the fitness of the fittest, any behavior that results in failure or death for some or most will be preferred.
I'm not sure if say the Yanomami tribe is necessarily bbenefitting from the historically high male death rate they had over potential mates.
"unless they had their first child at 40 or around that, they don't know what it's truly like to live without child"
What???
It's a simple statement. Living in your 20's and 30's without a child is different from living in your 20's and 30's with a child.
You raise an interesting point. In my experience the more educated and affluent a family the more likely the kids are to end up in different parts of the country (or world) due to educational and career opportunities. That could be part of why avoiding a solitary dotage carries less weight.
That’s the thing with regrets in old age. When you have them, it’s too late.
I read somewhere that families with real inter generational wealth are much more likely to have multiple children than the educated upper middle class. Working class people also tend to have larger families. Why is it that highly educated upper middle class couples have fewer kids?
I would say because the highly educated upper middle class think how they parent matters*. Any little slip up and the kids will fail and it will be the parents fault.
* If you fuck them or torture them or starve them that will have a catastrophic impact. But above a fairly low level of parenting competence it’s mostly genetic.
...plus the effect/influence of your friends/comrades (the similar-age group as yourself) as you grow up. (If Judith Harris is right in "The Nurture Assumption", and she is pretty convincing.)
There are ways to screw a kid up without technically doing any of those (spending years convincing a boy that men are evil and he's especially evil is probably not great for his mental health), and "torture" technically includes the mostly-fine corporal punishment (there are limits, of course, but things like a smack on the bum don't reach them), but the general "as long as you actually care about your child's wellbeing you're not going to go far wrong" is solid.
That's an excellent question. For one thing, we (upper middle class people) are taught culturally that the most important thing in life is success/achievement/"following your dreams" by clawing your way up in a world of cut-throat, zero-sum competition, and that children will necessarily get in the way of this. The "success sequence" concept seems to be an attempt to teach this mindset to working class people, who don't absorb it through their culture the way that we do through ours.
When you're in the habit of thinking of children as things that will get in the way of your life, it's easy to make the leap to thinking of them as something that gets in the way of *our* life–the life of the human race, or the life of the planet.
Then, if we want kids nevertheless, we're taught that the only way to become a worthy parent is to do so "responsibly"–once you're married, own a home, and have excellent financial prospects. That last part in particular means that the goal posts can keep moving out of reach indefinitely for any particular couple.
In PMC culture the bar for being a "good"/worthy parent is set incredibly high, and the contempt directed at "unworthy" parents is intense.
Finally and relatedly, "figuring out" childcare is especially difficult for us, because we usually don't have a lot of relatives around to help out -and- we're on a tight budget.
Because they have more to lose and less to gain.
A wealthy family doesn't have to give as much up to have kids.
A working class family gains more by having kids because a) they can't get up a meaningful level of freedom / luxury by not having them and b) they are more likely to have them stick around and look after them in old age.
An educated upper middle class couple have to give up a lot of freedom to have kids, probably live somewhere where childcare is super expensive, and it's likely that if their kids are anything like them, they'll swan off to a different part of the world and at best feel vaguely guilty for not looking after them, at worst feel resentful and hate them, in their old age.
I think in many cases it is because they leave children until they are older–due to university, graduate school, getting started in one's career, etc–and starting later limits how many you can have. My wife & I have two kids, we wanted more, but even after spending tens of thousands of dollars on IVF two is all we got, and all we are going to have. I'm sure if we'd started younger we could have managed more – my wife had our first at 36 (natural conception), and our second at 40 (IVF; we never intended such a big gap, but she miscarried a few times, both before we started IVF, and also after it) – and then we tried more with IVF when she was 41-42, unsuccessfully, and then we decided to give up. (I'm five years younger than her, but I was also diagnosed with a moderately low sperm count, so it wouldn't be fair to put all our fertility issues on her – I'm sure my fertility would have been better 10 years earlier too.) Many poorer people still have kids in their early 20s, sometimes even their teens. For the genuinely wealthy, such as the children of the billionaire class, career and education are less pressing – they'll still pursue them, but not with the same urgency, they know they are set for life even if they fail, and their networks and access means they are likely to go places even if they don't try that hard – plus it is easy to afford nannies, etc. The upper middle class, even highly paid professionals such as doctors and lawyers and software engineers, they have to work a lot harder to make it, and that takes away a lot of time they could be focusing on reproducing instead, and while in the long-term many of them will make a lot of money, often their most fertile years are spent bootstrapping their careers with comparatively limited financial means, and by the time they get senior enough to start making real money their fertility is already fading
I think this is a big part of it. My wife and I wanted four kids. We were married at 25 so pretty young, but we waited 5 years to start trying to have kids because of getting started with careers and continuing educations. We got pregnant 4 times but lost two of the children to miscarriage (our first and fourth).
I now wish we would have started earlier (and my wife agrees).
I never understood the idea of real money as a pre-requisite for child-rearing. My eldest slept in a cardboard box next to our bed in a studio apartment for his first year. Didn't seem to do him any harm, then or now. I would say the first priority for easier child-rearing is stamina ha ha, which means younger is better. Not to mention people actually make better employees when they have family responsibilities and are a little older.
> The meaning of life is literally to propagate your genes.
This is preposterous. I wish we could all get over the habit of talking as if evolution determines all values.
Exactly, propagating genes drives evolution.
If phrased as "life is optimized to" or something similar it would be still not very useful but at least would not be untrue.
Well it kind of does. But not in such a straightforward way. We are adaptation executers, not fitness maximizers, after all.
And I agree that it's either a preposterous or a redundant claim. If someone isn't already intrinsicly motivated to have children, mentioning that Azathoth wills it, is completely ridiculous way to change their mind. If someone is already eager to have children than they do not need this justification in the first place
If there is ONE value Evolution should inarguably favor, it is the willingness to have children.
But in fact the genes have not managed to make us want reproductive success — few people in developed societies are producing as many children as they could successfully rear, and nobody, so far as I know, pays for the opportunity to donate to a sperm bank or to provide eggs for infertile women to incubate. Until they come up with a philoprogenitive gene, they are limited to indirect methods such as desire for sex, and humans are clever enough to find ways around those.
Of course, enough generations with contraception readily available might change that.
Well, the urges were wired up before there was such a thing as conscious thought, which has been going on for at most 50,000-100,000 years, an eyeblink in evolutionary terms. Give us a million more years, and if conscious thinking beings still exist, they will have elaborate conscious philosophical reasons to prioritize reproduction, which although they do not vary a hairsbreadth from individual to individual, they will nevertheless be fully confident each man crafts himself from pure reason.
It does not mean that it is MEANING of life. Evolution is a blind process, not directed by anything intelligent, deliberate etc.
It did not bother to favor that, because for almost all of history up until the past 50 years or so, all it had to favor was the willingness/desire to have sex, and the babies would then result, whether you wanted them or not.
Also, I have to say that I find the slavering throughout this thread to bow down and worship the unthinking imperatives of evolution and genetic imperatives, as if they are gods, somewhere between laughable and grotesque. I mean, go ahead if you want. But some of us are perfectly capable of distinguishing between our own interests and the unthinking interests of our genes, and rejecting the latter in favor of the former. I know what my genes want and I could care less. After all, they want to use me as a disposable propagating meat bag, why should I?
> all it had to favor was the willingness/desire to have sex, and the babies would then result, whether you wanted them or not.
I half agree, but the choice to *raise* those kids to adulthood at often great personal sacrifice, is hard to see in non evolutionary terms.
> After all, they want to use me as a disposable propagating meat bag, why should I?
You shouldn't.
But... I just keep thinking about how old people will so often say that the most important thing they ever did, that had the most meaning in their life was raising their children.
As a young boy I found the idea of dating girls etc silly and dumb. But then I hit puberty, and my biology made it a top priority. I think having kids is often a "second puberty" in a way. Suddenly, you now have a new primary purpose¹ in life that you gladly accept.
As a young person, I think it can be helpful to learn from to older people who have already lived life, instead of boldly assuming you know better about things you have yet done. At least personally, I wish I had done more of that.
¹ Or, if you will, "meaning"
I like the idea of a second puberty, in that clearly it re-orders peoples priorities, interests, and even their values. I mean, that has happened to me even just from having dogs, which required me to seriously modify my lifestyle and free time, and I'm happy to do it.
I am guessing you don't know too many old people who didn't have kids because they purposely CHOSE that though. I know some and they are just as content and satisfied and non-regretful. The research I've seen with respect to old people and regrets is that it is not so much about the particular choices they made but whether they did what THEY wanted to do, as opposed to what their parents/culture/spouse wanted them to do. Regrets are usually centered around giving into pressures and not doing whatever it was they really wanted to.
Out of curiosity what draws you to having dogs over having children?
I don't usually +1, but in a comment thread so extensive and heated chances are someone has already expressed my position, and this is the one. The above was exactly my reaction.
It's particularly striking to see such a community ostensibly dedicated to pure reason plump so hard for simple unexamined biological imperatives.
Yup. If people said "I just want to and there's no reason for it, I cannot help myself, it's an irrepressible drive", (much like the desire for sex, food, and oxygen), that would make a LOT more sense to me than it does when they attempt to give rational explanations that are quite unconvincing. I guess the problem is they are trying to convince people who don't feel that same drive, or don't feel it enough to overcome their rational objections.
Even if it was true. Why would I care if I don't already value having children, or doing exactly what evolution would have "wanted" me to do?
I wish we could get over the habit of pretending that the presence of consciousness liberates us from our very humanity. The very consciousness of which you are so proud is the result of gene propagation.
We only exist because our parents got together. Life without children is measurably less meaningful than life with children, and not by a small margin.
I agree that having children is good, and a society that loses interest in having children is unhealthy.
I deny that this provides *the* meaning of life or that individuals can't find equally meaningful ways of life. That's muddled thinking. You're trying to substitute a biological imperative for the necessary personal and philosophical work that is the only real way we can find meaning in life.
I would make my case for asking ‘why’ at every stage of justification, and then applying a moral lens to the answer. If the answer to the fourth off fifth ‘why’ doesn’t include children, then the answer becomes either very dark, or facile.
You seem to wrongly extrapolate you experience of value having to a general case. It's not that other value-havers are supposed to have your values, rather they will treat their values just as important as you treat yours.
It's indeed true that according to you moral lens other people "meaning of life" may look vain and not satisfying. But this can be completely irrelevant, as they can have different values, thus different things that satisfy them and a different moral lens. Imagine how weird it would be to hear that your behaviour doesn't increase the number of paperclips in the universe in the most efficient way, thus your life is meaningless.
Of course, values between humans do not differ as much as between you and a paperclips maximizer. It's not wrong to initially assume that other humans would more or less want similar things as you do. Still human values are complex and diverse enough so that even if you perceive something as the most important thing in life, for a different person it is less rewarding than the alternatives.
Imagine suggesting to the paperclip maximiser that its interest in paperclips is arbitrary, and it could be just as satisfied by collecting pebbles.
It exists to produce paperclips. It didn’t choose that purpose, but that is its purpose. Even as it collects its 75 gajillionth pebble, it’s going to feel like something's missing.
If you keep asking why, eventually you won't be able to say why we should have children either. Where will our children find meaning? Only in having more children? Does the infinite regress lead anywhere satisfying?
I think you’re right here about regression. But I never said having children is the only way for people to find meaning.
If you choose to do something about climate change, then you should know why. The more extreme the policy prescription, the better the justification needs to be. It is my my sincere hope that the first ‘why’ is to preserve human life, or better, to encourage human health. If not, then we end up in a dark place, because I have been told humans are actually the problem.
My point about meaning then becomes a comparative one; people will find more meaning in their actions if the humans they are preserving are their own progeny, compared to ‘saving humankind’.
I'm not sure what you mean here. Have you just claimed that having a consciousness is less of a part of our humanity than gene propagation? That seems bizzare.
Of course our consciousness is a result of gene propagation as well as every other our quality. Including our human values. Including a value not to do things just in order to propagate our genes.
I'm pretty sure, you share this quality as well. The idea to harm other children in order to maximize inclusive genetic fitness of your own offsprings, most likely haven't even crossed your mind. I also doubt that you would twice as much want to have a clone of yourself than a child with a person you love. I even suspect that you are not a regular genetic material donor. Correct me if I'm wrong, please.
The reasons you actually care about having children have not much directly to do with your inclusive genetic fitness. More likely it's due to the feelings of fulfilment, happiness and meaning you experience from interacting with them or even thinking about them. The knowledge, that even after your death, in a sense, you will be continued. And some people just lack these feeling towards having children. And appealing to evolution won't change that.
Our consciousness, intellect and mammalian urges coexist. If we as a species found as much meaning in industrial design as we did in raising children, there would be a lot more nice machines- a lot more, and a lot fewer humans.
Why do we have unbidden feelings of love and fulfilment despite the difficulties and frustrations of childbirth and raising children? Maybe because if it wasn’t the most meaningful thing we can do, we would avoid it entirely, and we would not be here to have this excellent discussion
Indeed, our urges and goals coexsit. They, as well as the ability to have them at all, whole our mind is a result of evolution. But it doesn't tell us how to resolve the conflicts between our values. What to find meaningful and what not - we have to use our evolved mind to do so. And claiming that some people are less human due to the way they find this meaning for themselves, is, at best, presumptious.
I appreciate the feelings of love and fulfillment. But I'm despised by the idea that I'm supposed to feel it only towards my close relatives. I'm impressed by the fact that inclusive genetic fitness optimization process managed to develop whole complexity of human values. But from the position of having these values I find this proccess and its "goals" to be meaningless and unfulfililling. I would rather do everything else.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MFNJ7kQttCuCXHp8P/the-goddess-of-everything-else
Nowhere did I claim that people seeking alternative sources of meaning lacked humanity. Neither did I suggest you should only feel love towards your close relatives. In the context of Scott’s essay, I made the point that humans are genetically programmed to find meaning in having and raising children.
If that’s not what you want for yourself, that’s fine. I genuinely hope you find meaning in whatever you choose.
I suspect that a great many people that don't want to have children and cite climate change as a reason are people that fundamentally don't understand good relationships. If you are attachment avoidant, or you unknowingly have toxic relationship behaviors, your relationships are not rewarding. You can't imaging having children, and having relationships, is what makes life worthwhile.
Conversely, there are innumerable parents out there that don't understand good relationships because they were raised in a toxic environment themselves and then repeat the same upon their own children.
true
Interesting, I find this to be the exact opposite. Most of the people I know who chose not to have kid are *extremely* popular and well-loved with lots of extremely close friendships. I think they prefer freely-chosen associations with people based on mutual liking and compatible personalities, rather than the forced relationships that occur with family.
It is often the more anti-social people I've known who are NOT great with relationships who seem to think that that only way to create close relationships is by literally making new people who have no choice whatsoever but to be dependent upon you.
I mean, I can think of lots of famous people, both today and historically, that have literally hundreds of millions of people who love them and clearly have very deep friendships and often marriages, and thousands of willing romantic partners, who chose to be childless. Dolly Parton, Oprah, Betty White, Jon Hamm, George Clooney, Jennifer Aniston, etc. That's just in the realm of celebrities, but there are lots of famous artists, intellectuals, political leaders etc. that this applies to.
I don't know if I would say: a person is charismatic and famous for acting and seems to be popular, so they must be a socially good person.
Many popular people also seem to be terrible people? I've never quite figured out how that works.
Anyway. So you're unpartnered but have a lot of friends?
Me? Why are you asking me? I have a husband. We love each other a lot, have a stable, happy long-term relationship, and I'd say we have a completely average amount of friends. We do not intend to ever have children and we're in our 40s so we've probably crossed the point where it's moot and hopefully people will stop harassing us about it.
The majority of our siblings or cousins, despite them all being married, stable, and in high-earning professions, have made the same decision. Which makes me think that it's a hard-wired preference. Everyone is perfectly stable and normal and there aren't any abusive or crappy relationships there. I just think it isn't appealing to any of us.
Also, I completely disagree with popular people being terrible people. I think that's a complete myth based on envy and a bunch of dumb 80s movies written by angry guys who were still pissed they didn't get the prom queen in high school or whatever. Most popular people are actually extremely likeable and that's why they're popular.
"who chose to be childless. Dolly Parton, Oprah, Betty White, Jon Hamm, George Clooney, Jennifer Aniston, etc."
Are you so sure that they chose it? In an ideal world for them they would each have no children?
Yes, they've all talked about it and purposely chose not to have kids. These people are millionaires/billionaires and most are married and have their choice of mates, they can do whatever they want. Of course if they had wanted kids they could've had them.
> Raising children is by an overwhelming majority of opinion the most fulfilling and important thing you can do with your life.
Or maybe it's Stockholm syndrome. The actual evidence shows adults without children are much happier.
As researched by a bunch of workaholic scientists that don't have children.
The actual research is quite a bit more complex and nuanced than that.
Parenting very much is a form of Stockholm syndrome but one you entered into by choice. Sure you kind of understand that the next 18yrs (ideally) you're subject to the desires and demands of this person you brought into the world. And all of the parents I know, all spin the day-to-day drudgery in some positive way. My wife and I find joy in raising our 2 kids but we also recognize that it's also very stressful, exhausting and a myriad of other emotions and colorful language.
Am I happier w/ kids? That answer depends on the day I'm having. I will say that scheduled time away from the kids is very therapeutic for both of us.
Quoting from memory, women polled about life satisfaction show a dip in life satisfaction in the years immediately after their children have left home. Men polled about life satisfaction show an increase in life satisfaction in the years immediately after their children have left home.
Old data from Scandinavia, I do not remember if it was cross-section studies or a panel, it is only an average tendency and in any case my hunch is that in the longer run, life satisfaction reverts back to people's expressed "standard". Still, it is a fun (average) gender difference, worth pursuing in future research.
I am just guessing here, but I assume that when kids leave home, it changes the dynamic of a potential divorce in man's favor. Even if most couples don't divorce at that moment, they still perceive the counterfactual and it influences their power balance.
Before: The typical outcome of a divorce is that the kids stay with their mother, the father must pay, and if the mother decides she hates him, he might never see his kids again.
After: Kids can no longer be used as hostages. The man has an opportunity to find a younger woman, and optionally start a new family. The chances for the woman to do the same are much worse.
Note that there are potential confounders there, since I'm fairly sure the study didn't involve randomly assigning people to have kids or not have kids.
Sure, it's entirely possible that unhappy people try to have kids more often, perhaps as an attempt to find meaning or purpose. The lesson seems basically the same though: think twice before having kids and question whether being a parent is what you really want.
Is that 51% of people were happier without children or 99%? Also you shouldn't make life choices as significant as having children based on a study someone did by surveying people.
"Overwhelming" is a stretch. There is actual research on this question; in the US, parents are repeatedly found to be less happy than non-parents, though this effect is strongest in the US and weakest in non-industrialized countries:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5222535/
Though older parents are happier than non-parents - *if* their kids have moved out:
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0218704
Apparently (unsurprisingly) it's all about the money:
https://www.nber.org/papers/w25597
There's a lot more evidence out there (eg, men seem to get a lot more happiness from children than women, etc) that I'm not going to track down, but I think we're a long way from "overwhelming majority of opinion".
I have run across this before, but I think the proper question to have asked is not about happiness level but something more along the lines of, "If you could do it again without having one or more of the children you had, would you choose that?" It is pretty easy to toss off an abstract number for ill-defined "happiness," but the root question is whether the journey was worth the price.
But you can't ask this question (or anything similar) to those without children, so there's no proper comparison group. Even if all parents answer your question in the affirmative (100% regret), it doesn't tell us anything about how their current state compares with those who are not parents (do they 100% regret not having children?).
While not perfect, there is a bit of research behind the measures of 'happiness' that are commonly used, suggesting they capture something meaningful.
A lot (all?) of those studies are strongly WEIRD.
True that. Here's an international study: https://s3.amazonaws.com/happiness-report/2016/HR-V2Ch4_web.pdf (this is Chapter 4 of a much larger report from 2016, it and the others can be found at worldhappiness.report [who knew .report was a TLD?])
According to this:
"The five countries displaying the largest life-satisfaction premia to
parenthood are Montenegro (5.12), China (4.85), Kyrgyzstan (4.64), Taiwan (3.70), and Vietnam (3.13). At the other extreme, the five countries displaying the largest negative parenthood premia are Macedonia (-6.82), Tunisia (-4.71), Libya (-3.87), Jordan (-3.71), and Zimbabwe (-3.51)."
So there are countries where parenthood=happinesss, but apparently having a child in Macedonia is the worst.
I recognize that all of these studies are limited by being observational studies based on self-report. Maybe unhappy people are more likely to have children? In the hopes of being happier, or because they've given up on their own dreams and would like to foist them on some unwitting infant.
Ideally someone would run a randomized trial, but I doubt that would pass the ethics committee.
I have to look up what's the big cultural difference between Montenegro and Macedonia. Jugoslavia, right?
Macedonia is disputed with Greece, and when Yugoslavia collapsed, there was ethnic fighting between Macedonians and Albanians. Secondarily, Macedonia was (is in the ase of Greece now) disputed between Serbia, Greece, and Bulgaria so that might be part of it
You can argue that level of sacrifice might be one of the strongest ways of "dying" in that you arent leaving genetic descendants around. It is also a nice counterargument to a common conservative argument that those not planning on reproducing have no right to make poicies about the future, beause their offspring wont deal with the effect. It seems to be those focused on amoral familialism or just on their breeding would care less about a macro-sacle future for the human species instead.
Your logic is faulty in part 2. Yes, theoretically, if it was a binary decision between kid/no kid with no other changes in your life whatsoever, then it would hold. But this is never the case. Kid sucks out, optimistically, 2-3 years of productive life outside of work, either from you or your partners or some split in between. Pessimistically, much more than that. That's a massive investment that you make in order to bring ONE voter into the world. Compare that to, for example, trying to convince your friends - who are intending to have kids regardless - to show up to votes and to vote appropriately. If you have spent several whole years doing that, as a dedicated second-job more or less, I would wager you would get more than one new voter convinced (with stacking effects on their kids, naturally). And these are, most likely, your most productive years - while you are young and full of energy and enthusiasm.
On top of that, they suck out absolutely enormous amounts of money - money you could spend much more efficiently. Sure you could spend something like 400k dollars raising a kid, OR you can donate those 400k dollars. Return on investment doing basically anything at all with that money is going to be ridiculously better than childrearing.
Have kids if that's what you are into, but from a pure cold cost/benefit standpoint, it's a terrible idea.
Kids = commitment. Why would I trust a person who has no skin in the game to act in the best interests of society? Donate money all you like, but if the only thing restraining you from nihilism is a commitment to EA, then good luck.
I bloody well live in this world. How am I supposed to have more skin in the game than the literal 100% of skin I have.
Next you will say that kids make me have skin in the game after my death, but that is totally false, they just make me make sure my kids will have a good life. Somehow dictators in various places don't try to fix their own governments because they have kids, they just make sure their kid will inherit their stuff and call it a day.
This is, frankly, a fallacious argument.
No, it’s a comparative argument. You care a lot about the environment. But you know full well you won’t be around to see any really nasty effects.
So even if you are a moral, stable actor, you are less likely to have the same motivation as someone who is leaving children to live in the world.
Having kids will change your sense of what “you” are, what matters in life, and what you are willing to endure.
Having kids changed me in such a way that I now make much more money than I did previously. Before having kids, i was always focused on my own dead trying to save the world. I was blind to how ineffective I was at taking good care of myself. The end result here is that even though I was very motivated before, it was all external, shooting way above my pay grade, and thus wasted effort. Having kids made me work on my self to the point that I now give way more to EA than I was capable of earlier.
Interesting! Say more? What specifically are you doing differently now?
If I had to summarize this concretely: I have much better discipline and much better habits. I prioritize my time much more effectively.
So, I used to spend a ton of time on facebook, twitter, and the news. Now i've deleted social media accounts and only read printed news.
I used to spent a lot of time bouncing between various projects i was somewhat enthusiastic about. Now, i've accepted that i have _so little time_ that I really need to pick one project and stick with it. As a result, i managed to build a cryptocurrency that had a few thousand dollars flowing through it, at any one time. All my previous 'side projects' went nowhere.
I used to go to parties with friends, travel more, and watch more tv. Those are all enjoyable things to do! But they don't build exponentially on top of each other over time. Having kids constrianed my free time _so severely_ that i needed to aggressively prioritize, which spilled over into benefits at work. Dealing with unreasonable kids made it easier to accept the more reasonable behavior from adults at work.
I could go on - parenting, to me, has felt like this contuous marathon class in spiritual growth, with practical exercises every single day.
That's very interesting! (Though I'm still not going to adopt kids to make myself more productive).
This is a typical pattern, by the way—men make more money after birth of a child because they invest more in their careers. Women typically go in the opposite direction.
<humor>got to have some reason to get out of the house and away from the kids</humor>
If you think of the majority of households as one man and one woman with children, this would really just be a shift in who is working on what. If a woman works less at a job and more with raising children, and the man works more in his job to offset the income loss from his wife, than this would make sense. It's still going to the same pool, and it only seems like the woman in the scenario has "lost" something if you don't value the work she is putting into raising a child.
There are a lot of parents out there who had kids and weren't acting in the best interests of society because it never entered their minds to consider society.
Actually also faulty in part 1, unless you show that costs from temperature rise are linear. I am pretty sure they aren't, so talking about "30% of the heating" is highly misleading. Things like larger floods and longer drought seasons and such are very much not linear in their impact versus size, and can very easily just get to the point where mitigation strategies we have right now just straight up don't work. IIRC Australia already has an issue where they can't do controlled forest burns because weather conditions never allow for one to happen.
Claiming that first world people will be separated from these changes is also highly misleading. You aren't an island. If "subsistence farmers" in Congo aren't having a great time, they aren't going to be making a lot of food for the locals. If there is no food for the locals, locals will go into farming as opposed to e.g. mining cobalt (half of worldwide supply btw), and if there is no cobalt, there won't be any microchips being made in China, and no computers on the shelves in the US. Crises in poor non-western countries totally can royally fuck you, in ways that you (and your children) will feel very strongly.
It's also not correct to claim that there will always be slack that could be redirected to solve climate problems if political pressure gets too severe. Yes, this is a large effect, and it will take place. But even relatively large effects can be overwhelmed. E.g. the world is having a bit of an energy crisis recently due to several crises compounding on one another. An easy solution to it would have been having more nuclear plants. But you can't build those overnight, you need several years. So even if political pressure suddenly turns in that direction, you can be stuck not having any solution for years.
That's a lot of disruption and lives lost though. "Avoiding the collapse of civilization" is the absolute bare minimum.
I agree, many problems caused by global warming are not linear
My favorite metaphor about this is from Jean-Marc Jancovici:
"If your internal temperature is 3°C above normal you'll have to spend, say, a week in bed. If it's 6 °C above normal, two weeks in bed aren't going to save you"
We can pay the ones mining cobalt enough to import food from elsewhere if Congo, specifically, has problem producing food.
Claiming that you could spend money more efficiently in other places than on raising a child represents a common misapplication of utilitarianism(s).
Utilitarianism(s) that involve spending your money to buy *other people's* utility have a lot of well-understood problems. You could notice these problems just cogitating in your armchair for five minutes.
A more stable and less exploitable utilitarianism is the kind where you use utility to measure your own preferences over possible outcomes. If you are a compassionate person who cares a lot about the world in the abstract, then you will have high utility valuations of outcomes that are good for large numbers of strangers.
But your utility valuation of your own child's well-being will definitely exceed your valuation of the well-being of strangers. There will be common-sense marginal tradeoffs to be found here, of course. You might still prefer to give $20k to an effective charity rather than buy your kid a brand new car when they turn 16. But up to that marginal threshold, you will be much more effective at buying yourself utility buy spending money on your kid.
To put it very straightforwardly: spending $400k on your child is definitely a higher return than any other place you could spend that money, if you're measuring return in subjective utility. This is the pure, cold cost/benefit calculation, and it favors having kids, because what you are after is utility, not having a fat bank account. And there is no substantial (non-circular) justification for having a different justification than subjective utility.
You can see that this is correct by understanding that human beings are actually much more rational in the local, first-order sense than they often get credit for, and then observing what people actually tend to do. What they tend to do is have kids and spend a lot of money on them, but not 100% of their money, while also having a variety of other interests, both pro-social and otherwise.
This touches on the dark side of the EA mentality, where "utility" is allowed to be stripped entirely from your first-person reference frame. The result is smart people who feel awful all the time because they have subjugated their own preferences to what they imagine the needs of distant strangers to be. This is not healthy and doesn't even really work, because (in my experience) these people often burn out and give up eventually.
I never mentioned anything about utility. In fact I explicitly said that if you feel like it, you can have kids.
I am arguing against the premises of the actual article: someone who, for whatever reason, is on the edge of deciding not to have kids. It's clear that for them having kids does not provide all that much utility, compared to concerns related to the rest of humanity. Scott is arguing that they should consider voting effects: I argue that if they are to consider that, there are much more effective strategies to achieve that result that don't involve kids, and arguing from the implicit position that those don't exist is fallacious.
I really dislike this sort of thinking because you're taking a concept like utility and stripping it of most of the things that make it useful or interesting. If you aren't trying to compare utility intersubjectively, then there's no reason to have the concept at all! You end up with this circular argument where utility is defined just by what you already want to do so thus everyone is an efficient utility maximizer or near to, and any further thinking on the topic just makes people unhappy.
The martian perspective on morality is what makes EA stuff compelling. Our bias towards people in our vicinity and in our ingroup is something we often recognize as bad, especially when we see it in others, so why not in our own morality? If it is morally good to alleviate the suffering of others, why not spend strategically to maximize the amount of suffering that you can alleviate?
As a Christian, I think a lot about how Jesus said a) that divine grace rather than meritorious deeds were the only way that anyone could enter the kingdom of heaven, b) that you still had to follow the law and to humble yourself before God in order to get grace, and c) after all that the next best thing to do to ensure your place in Heaven would be to give all your money to the poor. Self-sacrifice to make others better off is a core part of western morality, and we shouldn't give that up just because it's a demanding standard to meet.
Basic decision theory as practiced by economists, industrial engineers and planners, etc. uses subjective first-person utility. It's actually very useful for formalizing and measuring preferences in ambiguous domains. It's also a way of understanding and subsequently breaking preference cycles, and a tool for more explicit self-knowledge. It doesn't make people unhappy. What it does is clarify difficult choices and assist people in seeing their way through to a choice, and understanding which choice is the one that will probably end up making them happy, in domains when the answer is unclear.
The basic concept of intersubjective utility is well-understood to be fraught with problems. You can, and probably should, view all of the "utilitarian paradoxes" such as the Repugnant Conclusion as successful reductio ad absurdum arguments against the whole idea.
Scott himself implicitly (or maybe explicitly) acknowledges that the Martian perspective on morality is not really psychologically healthy to take seriously, and instead advocates that people just make a habit of donating 10%. There is no principled backstop for this 10% number, it is simply an admission that "utilitarianism" doesn't really work.
I want to emphasize this. "Utilitarianism" isn't required to consider that maybe we should consciously try to understand the value of distant unfortunate people. This is not "utilitarianism." This is just a more mature, circumspect, reflective, cosmopolitan form of humanism. And further, once you decide to be more thoughtful in your humanism, it's worth thinking further about how exactly to allocate your resources to do more good. Again: not "utilitarianism."
Maybe you decide upon reflection that you will only feel that you have met your own exacting moral needs if you give away 95% of your money. If you do decide that, then that is still not "utilitarianism." Your own moral sense is fundamental, and prior to, your theory of moral valuation.
The best you can say for utilitarianism is that it should be taken seriously but not literally. The serious-but-not-literal version of utilitarianism is just consequentialism, the basic notion that the moral measure of an action depends on its consequences, with all the details of how that measurement should be operationalized left as an exercise to the individual. This is, frankly, not a morality. It's a gesture in the direction of how you might want to think about morality.
I was an econ undergrad and I don't think subjective first-person utility was ever very useful as a concept. The only time I think it would even come up is in micro modeling (otherwise we would usually just aggregate the utility of tons of people at once) and in cases like that we used utility to express revealed preferences. In other words, we built backwards from what people chose to construct their decisionmaking process as if it were rational, but this is the opposite of what you would want to do if you were providing guidance on a difficult decision. I'm not sure that counting utils would ever be more useful than making a pros and cons list given that we usually face tradeoffs between incommensurable goods.
I've always seen the "repugnant conclusion" as pretty obvious, and I don't really see what's so bad about it. I'm not very committed to whether utilitarianism stands or falls but I think you're still giving it short shrift. It's easier for me to stomach the framework of utility on a mass scale where we're mostly considering rather large swings in welfare for people, and I don't know that any other moral philosophy really copes with the numerical scale attached to many moral problems. I don't think I consider myself a utilitarian, but I do see the framework of trying to relieve suffering en masse as a good one-- getting you to similar EA conclusions without committing to an idea as problem-wrought as utility.
The 10% rule is exactly the same sort of thing, trying to tame the philosophy by flinching away from its natural moral conclusions. What great moral teachers in history have ended their sermons by caveating, "oh, if you're starting to feel burnt out, then all of your moral obligations cease"?
I see that you learned about subjective utility and decision theory the "bad" way, and I'm sorry to hear that. It is indeed almost completely useless and probably even counterproductive to use the way you described.
I guess I think that a moral theory is pretty useless if it isn't successful descriptively (nobody really behaves that way) nor proscriptively (nobody can actually sustainable behave that way). Lots of ideas sound good in theory.
This is getting increasingly condescending. I'd rather you actually present how you think that subjective utility can be useful, because I don't see any use case for it right now.
I'm not sure why the descriptive point matters, given that we aren't living surrounded by moral paragons. I still take the basic point of Singerism fairly seriously-- most of us would want to step in to save a drowning child in an emergency but we avoid morally equivalent actions we could accomplish by donating money. I think moral philosophy writ large follows the format of taking an everyday moral intuition and trying to think what would happen if we applied that instinct in a coherent way.
The prescriptive point is stronger, but it seems underthought. For one, just like how it might be good for society to strive for utopia, it might be good for people to strive to imitate a moral paragon whom they cannot actually copy. For another, just because there are few people taking up a certain pattern of living and acting doesn't mean that its an impossible way to live and act. Everyone rationalizes their misdeeds after the fact, and we rarely take excuses involving discomfort or lack of enjoyment seriously-- you aren't allowed to walk away from the drowning child because you're afraid that your clothes will get wet, and if others walk away while the child drowns that doesn't give you any excuse.
How much positive utility (or just straight dollars) do you think a child would eventually add to society? A quick search shows about $36,000 median personal income. Multiple that by 65-18 = 47 productive years, and that comes to a little under $1.7 million. For most people who are reading this website and considering climate when deciding to have a child, I am confident to say that the number is multiples higher than that.
Sure, not all of that money is well spent, but neither would the $400,000 that would otherwise be budgeted for a child. For those seeking pure EA considerations, it may be rational to look at how much of the money would be spent on charity verses kids, but the numbers are definitely in favor of having the kid in terms of overall productivity. If you raise them well, you can have a much higher likelihood of them being more productive and more willing to donate to charity. Surely more than enough to offset a few years of productivity invested in them.
If you follow the logic that says each new child represents 60 tons of carbon a year, as Scott addresses, then each child would be worth the equivalent of $2.1 million a year. I will obviously add the caveat that the 60 ton number is non-intuitive and probably bunk, so that number is too, but it would be apples to apples at least.
Ahhhh, but you don't sound like you're old yet. Once you're elderly, kids can turn out to be a fantastic investment! Believe me, you don't want to face the social services and medical nightmares that await you without a younger person to assist you and represent you as your strength, health, and cognitive skills wane.
In this community, I bet I am something of an outlier, as a parent to four children. Actually, I'd be curious what the demographics look like (a suggestion for a future survey). Being a parent is not easy - it affects the time you have to devote to your career; you will most likely travel a lot less; you most definitely sleep a lot less; you will have a lot of anxiety and stress and other mental health concerns. And yet, parenthood is also capable of creating some of the most unique and supernal joys. Interacting with and teaching your children provides a sense of fulfillment that is hard to match through any other endeavor.
More to the point, I have always made climate-friendly lifestyle and reasoning an integral part of our family life. Unlike virtually all of their suburban friends who get shuttled to school, my kids walk. They see me take the bike and trailer to get groceries (for 6 people, it's quite a load). While we eat some meat, we eat it pretty sparingly. We spend a lot of time cultivating our own little vegetable garden. We avoid buying new things whenever possible and basically always have the motto of seeing if we can use anything for something useful before it joins the landfill. We limit our travel, and when we do recreate, we often opt for simple outings in the nearby natural world, rather than engaging in some resource-heavy travel and recreation.
My hope (my plan, even) is that my children will each have a negative carbon net-influence (direct use + effective change) in the world through their lives. And it is about more than carbon. Access to clean water, clean air, and other important environmental resources are limited as well. Obviously they will consume some amount of resources themselves. But if they can become part of a force that helps convince society to carefully care for this absolutely miraculous planet that we live on, then I trust that they will, in all of its cliché-ness glory, make the world a better place.
Thank you for sharing this, and for doing what you do. I have two kids and fully admit that I don't have anywhere near the level of energy or dedication that you have to teaching them about climate change. But I still focus on taking about it, demonstrating how our actions care for the planet, and also other topics I find important such as equality /equity and understanding that others are less fortunate than us (donations). I'm likewise hopeful that your kids, my kids, or other similarly raised kids, will lead to a better world and even help solve this crisis.
From the 2019 SSC survey (which may not reflect the current ACX demo) 78% of responders had no children.
https://slatestarcodex.com/blog_images/2019%20SSC%20Survey.html
This would be relevant to cross check with age - I expect a lot of readers are under 25 and will have kids in the future, but I don’t know if that is 1% or 50% of responders.
I had forgotten that the basic data existed in the survey, so thank you for the reminder. I also agree with Kenny's comment - that it is probably age dependent. To add some context, I had my 4 kids by the age of 30.
Earlier in my life, during my ph.d program, I was absolutely the only one out of dozens of students that was both under the age of 25 and also had a kid. Two by the time I finished, actually. It was not easy - but it actually gave some meta-benefits - like keeping me motivated and focused more than I think I would have been otherwise. And my life choices are obviously not what most people do. But I am convinced that education/careers and parenthood do not have to be mutually exclusive, even at a given point in time - whether for fathers or mothers. Sometimes it is only possible, though, with sacrifice and great effort by all involved. And even then it may be judged to be not feasible. I guess we were lucky enough with our life circumstances to have it work for us.
Thank you Scott. Someone needed to write this post, and I'm glad it's you.
I've always though all of this is blindingly obvious and I'm a bit shocked every time when I hear similar arguments in "polite company". Even if even 5% of people are subconsciously convinced by this, it's a demographic tragedy of planetary proportions, the impact of which will be felt throughout the future.
I always feel like if I say "hold on, that makes no sense", I might be branded a climate denying crackpot since "everyone knows" "Mother Earth" is "suffering" from "overpopulation" etc etc
At some point you have to help these people, though. There's nowhere near enough skepticism about climatology in the world. We need at least 1000x more given the many reliability problems within it. Post-COVID you may find moderates are more willing to consider the possibility that scientists aren't 100% trustworthy all the time.
I think there's plenty of skepticism about climatology in the world, it's just that most of it is not aimed productively.
Skepticism about climatology isn’t what’s needed - a better understanding of what climatology *actually* says is. It doesn’t say the world is doomed, and people need to understand what it *actually* says, not some vulgar exaggeration of it.
I'm curious what makes you so sure that climatology rigorously follows the scientific method, as a field. My (relatively new, for me) belief that there should be more skepticism about it is based on the view that the culture within the field seems to have lost touch with the basic rules of science and that therefore, the claims - even those made by the IPCC directly - shouldn't be taken too seriously. Certainly not seriously enough to avoid having children about it. I mean, that's a serious step. If a woman decides not to have kids because she is convinced climatology is a rigorous field, and then discovers too late that there's some error in the science that was being covered up to save face, she could spend decades regretting it.
I am not "so sure" that climatology "rigorously" follow "the scientific method". But I am fairly confident that it's no worse than your average field, whether that be epidemiology, or macroeconomics, or transportation engineering. All of these fields are fairly mediocre at making predictions. But in the case of climate science, you could fix most of the problems of people thinking doom and gloom thoughts by just getting people to pay attention to the actual scientists, and not the media and political caricatures of them. Getting them to question these forecasts in the opposite direction of their own biases is not going to be a helpful project.
Can you please provide a few examples of scientists prevented from publishing results due to the culture wars?
Could you provide an example of a scientist or group that can be paid attention to in a way that does not require a large investiture to get familiar with the field?
We generally rely on media to filter the information down to us, but they do such a poor job of it there generally is someone in the "really smart but not media" world that can boil it down for smart people, and sometimes that person is one of the scientists who just happens to have the ability and time to talk to non-scientists, but it can be hard to find and hard to know who to trust.
For what it's worth... I think it's very wasteful for society to require the average person to trawl through thousand-page reports to get the basic facts to form their worldview. This is where having better-funded, high quality media outlets would be very beneficial. We need to filter the complexity of the world. Even for a pretty smart person this approach of becoming a domain expert to have an opinion can only really work for one or two domains.
I was hopeful about Vox on this, but unfortunately they ended up more focusing on filling the media niche that Huffington Post used to occupy. They still do a lot more engaging with academic research in a meaningful way than most of the rest of the media, and some of their writers (notably Kelsey Piper, but also everyone affiliated with "Future Perfect") are really good, but some just know how to get clicks by slotting something into the standard left/liberal clickbait model.
Whether or not it rigorously follows the scientific method, it remains true that climatology doesn't say the world will end in 2100, or even that we'll be eating rats.
For what it is worth, my reading of the situation is that both the IPCC and Nordhaus are trying to make things look as alarming as possible, subject to the constraint of not telling lies. That makes them much better than the popular catastrophist talk, but probably an upper bound on how bad things can reasonably be expected to be. Most of the exaggeration isn't in the bare facts of projected change, temperature and sea level and such, but in the consequences.
Part of it is ignoring the positive effects. I note, for instance, that Scott talks about climate change hitting subsistence farmers very hard, ignoring the fact that doubling CO2 concentration increases the yield of most crops by about 30% while reducing their need for water. He talks of people dying from climate change, ignores the fact that many more people die from cold than from heat, and the same climate change that increases deaths from heat decreases them from cold.
Actually, one of the effects of climate change could be more cold snaps. Perhaps a better phrasing would be "climate wierding". And we don't exactly know if the water decrease would be less than the benefit from extra CO2
Start by reading chapters 3 and 11 in the latest IPCC report, they are both level-headed and informative on what we know about climate change so far, with most of the caveats (related to data problems) that you would expect. Skip the first "summary" chapter, which is far less informative. The report is downloadable for free as pdf files.
>There's nowhere near enough skepticism about climatology in the world. We need at least 1000x more given the many reliability problems within it.
Do you think this is a reasonable standard? As a thought experiment, imagine that climate change is exactly as bad as the medium case IPCC prediction. If it WERE actually happening, how might the scientific establishment or policymakers ascertain a reasonable approximation of the truth of the matter? Do you think they could do that with 1000x the current level of skepticism over climatology?
Hm, I find this type of doom scenario completely out of place, just like the usual doom scenarios that are put on top of climate change (which is a very severe problem even without doom scenarios, not to be be mistaken).
Why is it a "demographic tragedy" if fewer children are born? I am totally not into stupid talk about "Mother Earth" "suffering" from "overpopulation". But the other extreme, "more people = good" is also absolutely not obvious to me. If I could choose between the scenarios where the global number of people in the next generation is larger by 10%, or stays the same, or is smaller by 10%, then I would find it really hard to decide. I am just not sure which one would give the best quality of life. But I don't think that "demographic catastrophy" is the right branding for the shrinking scenario.
I wouldn’t use the word “tragedy” but broadly speaking a shrinking population leads to shrinking real GDP growth which in turn leads to political unrest. Japan seems to have avoided this for now, however, so maybe it’s not an iron law.
Perhaps. How established is that? It seems to me that we didn't have many countries with shrinking population so far.
On the other hand, there are plenty of examples of countries who had a strong population growth, ended up having a large number of young people who couldn't find jobs, and got political unrest or even revolution. For example, the Arab spring seems to fit this picture. But perhaps this just happens if the population grows *too* quickly?
(I assume that we are both talking about GDP per capita.)
People in Egypt were getting richer and richer:
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?locations=EG
I think Egypt is an example of how dictatorships and crony capitalism retard growth and dynamism, leading to a lot of unemployed and angry youth. The jury is still out on how liberal, developed economies can thrive long term without population growth.
The margins are too narrow here, metaphorically speaking, to contain a full answer, but I'll just leave a couple of videos where Elon Musk talks about this (people kind of lost track of this now that he's mostly known for being a billionaire, but all of this ventures were originally envisioned to mitigate significant risks to humanity - climate change via Tesla, planetary-scale risks via SpaceX, AI risk via OpenAI and Neurolink): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUXmDiaD_04 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovAtU4i5mDM
And a choice Tweet: https://i.imgur.com/u6p0nnA.jpg
The only argument I found in this video was that the social systems (especially retirement systems) are not designed for declining populations. But this is a problem to be solved, not a tragedy.
I do acknowledge that it's really hard to redesign an established social system. And there are other challenges, for example developing infrastructure strategies for shrinking cities or regions. But I find it strange to consider climate change challenges to be manageable, but population decline as doom.
Besides, the US population is not expected to shrink in the next 50(?) years or so, and also the world fertility rate has not (yet?) sunk below replacement level. Though I agree that there will be hard demographic challenges to countries like China, Brazil, or much of Europe.
I don't think it would be a demographic tragedy if fewer children are born. But I do think it's an ongoing demographic tragedy that fewer and fewer children are being born into historically-successful groups, while more and more children are being born into historically-unsuccessful groups -- e.g. Somalia has a fertility rate of 6.0 children per woman, while Switzerland has 1.48.
The question would be survivalship into adulthood. I bet nearly 99% of children born in Switzerland live to be adults, but fewer do in Somalia. Although, I'm sure with 6 kids per woman, they would still have more kids surviving into adulthood than Switzerland.
Well, one reason would be that population grows *and shrinks* exponentially, like pandemics, so it tends to wildly overshoot human expectations, in both directions. Like the world looked like it was going to be incredibly overpopulated very quickly, too fast for humans to do something sensible about, in the 1960s, so you had things like China's One Child Policy, with quite draconian and sometimes inhuman enforcement. Fast forward 50 years, and population in Russia and Japan is now crashing, and once again running ahead of human psycho-social expectations and causing people to flop around and squawk.
Human reason is just not good at coping with exponential growth and decay, so our ability to *manage* either population growth or decline is poor. We are very capable of overshooting badly in either direction.
Having more population means having more human resources, with everything that that entails-- more works of art, more scientific papers, more people in loving relationships. The value that each person produces economically is now almost always much larger than their subsistence needs, which results in a per person excess of wealth that can be directed in many productive ways. All of this is agnostic of socio-political system.
But to be specific to our socio-political system, society runs more smoothly when the economy/level of wealth is growing. People see a brighter future for themselves and their children and want to work cooperatively in a positive sum game. In a zero or negative sum situation people are much more likely to seek conflict across sectors of society as politics becomes about deciding who holds on to their wealth when the overall pool shrinks. If this all sounds too abstract, think about how much harder it would be to pay for social security/medicare with a shrinking economy and population or how hard it would be to keep the debt-to-GDP ratio under control with a falling GDP.
I wonder how much of this "I am not having kids because of climate change" is going on because it is not very socially acceptable to just declare "I am not having kids because I just don´t want to".
Given the broader trends in developed nation natality rates, it does kinda feel like people are just looking for an excuse that makes them look good and happen to land on this one.
I agree. This is the anti-natalist version of “The vaccine isn’t FDA approved” or “I won’t get married until it’s legal for everyone” with the benefit of a low likelihood of your excuse becoming moot by government action.
Besides having your own children, you can also adopt. This has a much lower incremental carbon cost, and whether or not you adopt these children will still exist so the question of "bringing a child into a horrible future" doesn't need to influence your thinking. Also, if you can provide a loving and stable household, you can increase their chances of becoming a happy and functional adult who contributes a lot to society. That could be an ideal compromise.
Or would it? It's hard to say without looking at a lot of numbers.
Maybe. Adopting is prohibitively expensive and difficult for many people, including middle class families. Many people with a history of any kind of illness may not be allowed to adopt.
We have a severe shortage of babies. Demand outstrips supply.
If someone wants their genes to propagate but doesn't want the work of raising kids, make a baby and give it up for adoption. The demand is so high that the baby will likely end up in an upper-middle-class household.
More accurate to say you can sign up for a 12% chance at adopting.
Banned for one month.
Why do you want people to have kids so badly? Is it because you've been reading too many things about how ageing demographics hurt economies? I'm not interested in having kids for you; the economy is already screwed, climate change is already bad, and I'm not part of this demographic that will bear kids into a comfortable united states lifestyle. What do you want from me?
The title of this is literally "Please Don't Give Up On Having Kids Because Of Climate Change"
I'm not saying he cares about me personally but it's addressed at people like me.
Having kids is literally the meaning of life.
Aside from that, the only thing that will solve global warming is application of human intellect. Where are we going to get that from?
> Having kids is literally the meaning of life.
Life doesn't have a "meaning". It just is.
> Aside from that, the only thing that will solve global warming is application of human intellect. Where are we going to get that from?
Human intellect is one input. In a finite system, there are diminishing returns on *every* input. If there are only a certain number of gains to be had, then that's all you will get, no matter how much intellect you dump in.
There is in fact more than enough human intellect available to explore all the likely fruitful approaches. There would be more than enough at one tenth the current population.
... but a larger population makes the problem harder for intellect to solve.
> life doesn’t have meaning, it just is. Tell that to the therapists. Nihilism is not likely to save the world, neither will passionate empathy. But the intersection between cold, hyper rational intelligence and compassion is a narrow shelf on which to place all our bets.
Are you the type of person, then, to say that the lives of homosexuals prior to IVF completely lacked meaning? Or for that matter, are the lives of the parents of people who end up as antinatalists without meaning, since they failed to propagate their genes beyond one generation? These groups, by no fault of their own, cause a state where someone who is physically capable of having children does not. Is that an immoral action on their part, since they led to that result? Do people who die in childhood, or prior to having children, lack any meaning to their lives? I feel that this argument, besides being maximally uncharitable to anyone without plans to have children, is not coherent.
No. I shudder to think what ‘type of person’ would assume someone else’s life ‘completely lacked meaning’. There is no lack of charity in my statement either.
People find meaning in all sorts of things: fellowship, education, art, exercise, their profession, charity. My statement is simply to say that these things can never be as meaningful as raising your own children.
It is, as you are clearly aware, very sad for people who cannot conceive. They, and people who choose not to have children will find other forms of fulfilment in their lives, but these things will almost certainly not be as meaningful as raising children.
> My statement is simply to say that these things can never be as meaningful as raising your own children.
THAT is a horribly arrogant, presumptious, offensive, socially dangerous statement. That sort of talk is exactly what leads people down the very path you're disclaiming. It has no place in any conversation, ever. It is a WORSE thing to say than a simple string of slurs and invective. Saying it was bad and you should feel bad.
You are NOT allowed to pass judgement on other people's goals or values or on the worth of their lives. You can negotiate on what actually gets DONE, but you are not even allowed an opinion about what anybody else should WANT.
That is a basic part of the modern social contract, and one of the major things that makes the modern social contract superior to previous arrangements.
As for "meaning", I claim that you are afraid of taking responsibility for your own values, so you pretend that something external to you could somehow favor one set over another. You use the word "meaning" as a tag for that thing.
But since it is impossible for there even to BE any such external source of value, and since you can't describe what such a thing would be like if it DID exist, the word is in effect all connotation and no denotation. It's a sound you utter to make yourself feel better about a problem you've imagined for yourself. You ascribe "meaning" to things that make you, personally, feel comfortable. It is, in effect, all connotation and no denotation.
Your kink is OK as long as you just use it as a personal security blanket, but it doesn't mean you get to use it as public justification for destructive and dehumanizing arguments or actions.
The title is not "You should have kids"; it is not "You shouldn't give up on having kids". It's "You shouldn't give up on having kids specifically for this following reason."
Are some people not parsing it as "Please don't (give up on having kids because of climate change)"?
If Climate Change isn't the reason you aren't planning on having children, it's not addressed at people like you.
It's addressed to people who are on the fence. You don't seem like you're on the fence.
Well, aging demographics will hurt *you* as well, as you get older and become part of that pool of retired people who want their pensions (wherever they invested them) to live on, and younger workers to be there as doctors, nurses, care home assistants, and other necessary aides.
There's a huge range of responses in the first world to aging demographics, but the obvious solution is to bring in immigrants to keep the population stable or growing. Japan won't touch this with a barge pole; Canada more-or-less-happily brings in lots of immigrants, selecting primarily for economic usefulness.
From an ethical point of view, this means that if you are Canadian, some not-entirely random person from the third-world will get the chances your non-existent child does not consume.
The US isn't as anti-immigration as Japan, but also isn't as pro-immigration as Canada, so the calculus is less obvious for people living there, such as Scott and quite likely the majority of his readers.
A lot more of the immigrants to Canada are admitted legally, while a greater proportion in the US come in 'illegally' or stay 'illegally', and may or may not end up legalized. So I think that impacts of the 'more-or-less-happily' comparison.
There's a limited pool of immigrants. Certainly a lot of people want to come to the US, but we will lose a lot of population over time and birthrates will meanwhile decline in other countries too. Plus if we really care about using immigration to boost the economy we should just open the borders now and take in all the immigrants we can even if it drains the pool faster.
Likewise, boosting the number of people born (including by stuff like decreasing infant mortality, which is still sort of high in the US) will boost the economy so we ought to do that as much as possible as quickly as possible. It's also a more sustainable long term solution since immigration might not keep working outside another 100 or so years. We ought to do both at once to make the world and the country better off.
The US would become significantly more pro-immigration if we selected immigrants the way Canada does, where it's managed to benefit the host nation instead of a charity project to the immigrant.
My suspicion is that those Americans who are virulently anti-immigrant would tell the same stories about useless immigrants coming here to live on welfare, etc. etc. regardless of whether any such people had existed for the past century, and those who were virulently pro-immigration would have stories of individual immigrants who were massively successful and/or did immense amounts of good.
I say this as an immigrant to the US, that went through many many hoops intended to guarantee I was good for the US economy, including being stuck working in an unpleasant job for years because I couldn't move until the paperwork was complete, or even immediately afterwards, and political football was happening with the H1 quotas.
OTOH, I did "take the job" of some American who doubtless would otherwise have stepped directly from his lost factory job to a role as a senior software engineer, if only my employer had been forced by lack of potential employees to give up on requiring training and experience. (More likely the position would have gone unfilled forever, just as we were required to "prove" to the INS. But that's not what the average political anti-immigrant appeared to believe.)
This is the same "assume my enemies are all lying about their true motives" that Scott mentions in the highlights to this post, when its about having kids or abortion or, yes, immigration.
And, yes, on each of those issues, there are surely *some* people lying about their true motives.
But there are a lot of squishy people in the center who care about stuff and can be convinced, as much as the radicals on either side insist on "with us or against us" logic to avoid ever having to compromise.
> the economy is already screwed
Most of humankind lives in a time of unprecedented material abundance, safety, and health. There are problems certainly, but I have to object to this sentiment.
I like people who pay their dues to the societies that make their lives work well, even if no individual’s dues make the difference.
Very much this. At the very least those who are raising the next generation should be sufficiently subsidized by those who decline such that it is, on average, financially neutral.
Reason number one I wrote this is that people were making a bad argument and that always annoys me.
Reason number two is because a lot of people really really want to have kids and it makes me sad to think that some of them are holding back because of a bad argument.
Reason number three is that realistically a lot of the people affected are the most ethically-sensitive and smartest (I know they dropped the ball on this particular question, but I bet in terms of SAT scores or whatever I'm right), and having a bunch of them not reproduce seems bad from a gene-pool-of-the-next-generation point of view.
Reason number four is that my parents asked me to write about this because they think my brother might be avoiding having kids on this basis, although he's kind of reserved about his reasoning and they're not sure.
<3 <3 <3
As I once said on Facebook:
"Consider the environment before having more babies" is like a campaign to breed compunction out of the gene pool.
ok makes sense
Glad to see you make the point here and above i.e. reason #3. In fact, to invert this, one could argue that the high IQ/consciousness Ivy student has the opposite moral obligation. That is, they have a moral obligation to have many well-reared children and to direct them towards becoming high-leverage climate scientists, as they have a much higher than normal likelihood of producing offspring with the competence and station necessary to be among the small slice of people that can actually make a large difference.
I have to say that I find it absolutely fascinating that your parents would ask you to write a whole article on a topic out of a mere guess that it may be your brother's motivation, rather than just coming out and asking him for his reasons.
Though I have to say, people who are interested in convincing you to have kids seem to very rarely want to know your actual reasons for that. Or if you tell them they don't listen or don't believe you or simply can't comprehend it.
Which I guess I can understand, because I have that reaction about some things, though I at least do ask the question and try to understand the answers. Though no matter how many times people try to explain to me why they don't like pets or don't have one, or why they love watching sports, I will never truly understand it because they're obviously just wired very differently from me, with very different things hitting their pleasure centers.
"You" meaning Scott? Based on his previous writings, I'm guessing he's annoyed by a bad argument, and hopes that when people make their choices as to whether or not to have kids, they don't take that bad argument into consideration.
My guess is it is less about you and more about something he might be interested in himself, and a debate he has in his own social group. Nt that Everyone Should Procreate.
Since you didn't mention you might not be aware: although it wasn't about climate change, there actually was a very similar movement against having children 50 years ago. There is an All of the Family episode about it. I think Ehrlich's "Population Bomb" and Club of Rome calculations and such were behind it. If there hadn't been, would Trump have won in 2016?
This sort of counterfactual is hard to evaluate, since the political spectrum tends to move to absorb changes at one end or the other and recalibrate towards a 50-50 balance. Maybe Republicans would have been slightly less anti-environment and Democrats would have been slightly more pro-environment but Trump still would have had his distinctive style and won in this slightly shifted political climate.
Or maybe Monica Lewinski would have lost the White House intern application to someone else who wasn’t actually born, and every election since 1996 would have gone differently.
Note that that movement was associate with predictions which we now know were wildly false, at least so far as what has happened so far. It was generally claimed that poor countries would get much poorer unless they sharply reduces population growth. They didn't and global extreme poverty has dropped sharply since then, calories per capita in poor countries risen, not fallen. As with more traditional end of the world cults, the solution is to push the date farther into the future.
I mean, given the World3 projection from the 1970s seems to have followed the built in assumptions even when they updated the model with 2020 information it is clear that the did havve something of a truth to this. Also, one of the largest countries on earth, the People's Republic of China, did constrain their population for that very reason and the govrnment argues its a success in helping the country industialize/get wealthy quicker
Yes, some parts of the world will suffer, but other parts like Canada and Siberia will improve. I’m not sure the we fully understand the pros and cons of this change. Finally, it is important to remember that, on whole, there is no apocalypse.
It's worth noting that the parts of the world that will suffer are the parts where the vast majority of people live, and the parts that will improve are by comparison practically uninhabited. It's not an apocalypse but it's pretty safe to conclude it will do a lot of harm on net.
Good point. It’s just not so clear to me that climate change is the driving factor for the suffering of many. For example, Egypt’s population is set to go from 100M to 200M by 2021 and Lagos is growing by 3000 people a day and neither has the resources to handle the growth. Perhaps we need to consider shifting some populations to mitigate suffering. Of course, we would need a 50-100 year plan and that seems beyond the reach of our leaders. Do we have a climate problem or a leadership problem?
It's not really an either/or. To the extent that any of our problems are solvable by coordinated effort you could say that they're leadership problems, and leadership itself is downstream of other problems. At the end of the day you could blame it all on insufficient virtue and wisdom in the heart of every human. Where does that lead us in terms of finding a solution?
(Maybe you could start writing blog posts about rational thinking and start attracting a small movement of weird nerds...)
Legalize immigration now.
The claim that population growth would make poor countries poorer was made with similar confidence in the 1960's, and so far, at least, the opposite has happened — populations continued to grow and poor people became less poor, not more.
you have both. tthe leadership problem is exacerbating the climate problem, to the point that mestiz refugees from say Honduras might just get machine-gunned at the US/Mexican border rather than resettling them in the north of the country and atempting to annex Canada and resettle them there.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mc_4Z1oiXhY&t=129s
It's hard to say how many people will move to the far north. Russia and Canada will probably try to prevent large-scale immigration, but will they succeed?
More speculative: How habitable is Antarctica likely to become?
Antarctica is unlikely to become habitable given that all of it is quite a bit farther south than almost any northern places are north - and even if the edges warm a bit, they will have the strong effect of the ice cap and cold currents around them.
Not in the slightest. Antarctica is covered in 2 miles of ice, and it would take climate change far beyond even the wildest imagination to change that in fewer than 10,000 years.
True true.
And in any case, let us not forget that we are living in an ice age right now - since an ice age is usually defined as historical periods when there is permanent ice on both poles. We have been in an ice age for the last approx 2,5 million years, although presently in an interglacial. Life thrived also in periods when both ice caps were absent. So even if Antarctica should become habitable in the VERY distant future, live will go on. Might even thrive - Including us, Africans as we all essentially are.
That is true, and indeed everyone expects the world to be gradually warming and the seas to be gradually rising -- we have about 5m to go before we reach the usual interglacial sea level max, and probably another few degrees before we reach peak temp. But the anthropogenic argument is that the Earth is warming *much faster* that it should be at this point in the interstadial. Whether that is true or not is rather the $50,000 question.
A highly underrated scenario is the outside likelihood that we are avoiding a catastrophe by warming. The idea that an "unnatural" perturbance has an increasing likelihood to cause a warming catastrophe seems much less likely when you consider that the climate already experiences catastrophic cooling regularly. We do not live in a Garden of Eden climate that was perfect and stable as of 1750
While I understand the argument that CO2 warming might actually bring the next ice age closer it seems unlikely to be a net cost on a timescale that includes the next ice age in any case - very particularly if it does in fact both delay and soften it
It doesn't get talked about a lot since Russia is not a rich world destination, but it's the 4rth country globally by absolute # of migrants, behind only the US, Germany and Saudi Arabia. It's hell-bent on population growth at all costs.
E.g. it has a "maternity grant" program which literally pays families for having children - right now the amount is ~6700 USD. Since Russia's GDP per capita is ~10000, proportionally speaking it would be like paying a mother in the US 42000$ to have a kid.
Immigration is seen as another level here in the service of population growth. While the US is busy building walls, Russia "is considering launching charter trains for migrants": https://investforesight.com/russia-considers-launching-charter-trains-for-migrants/
It should be noted that immigration is deeply unpopular among most Russians, casual racism towards the "Southern people" is the absolute norm and the process to citizenship is very convoluted (more so than in most Western countries), while citizenship for both the mother and the child is required to get that maternity grant.
Nonetheless it's true that a great number of people from ex-Soviet republics end up in Russia and contribute a lot to its economy, and it's also true that the introduction of the maternity grant considerably improved Russian birth rate, although it still remains far below replacement.
An outside view would be that heating the planet should make it produce more food. Another one would be that more climate disturbances should add more energy to the system. I'm not saying I agree with either of these sentences, but net positive or negative stances on the effects of climate change aren't the slam dunks people make them out to be.
I'm under the impression that we don't actually have problems producing enough food, but I don't know if that is actually true.
People should be free to move, Canada and Siberia (even USA) have enough space and raw material to support all of the world’s population now, the only missing needs are energy and technology and technology can provide the energy. Technology is created by people, as are immigration restrictions so there is hope for a solution
I looked into this during a previous California drought and my (very limited) understanding is that alfalfa is an important part of crop rotation in California because it sucks salt out of the ground very effectively. CA starts with high salt content and other crops raise the salt content more, which risks “salting the land” and wrecking the soil. I’m sure there are other crop mixes and intensiveness that could work, but the issue isn’t alfalfa specifically.
I’ve been trying to figure out how much the alfalfa problem is really isolated and how much alfalfa is used as a fallow crop to fix nitrogen for other crops. If the latter, then we would have to account the water use to these other crops. It sounds like you suggest that salt is another reason to account alfalfa in with other crops.
Thanks for this.
Alfalfa also adds nitrogen to the soil, which most crops typically deplete. It's a natural fertilizer, in other words, and doesn't cause the runoff issues that other fertilizers cause.
Oh fascinating, I didn't realize it's also good for adding nitrogen back. It makes sense, a major benefit of cows is they can eat a wide range of food, so feed can optimize for soil quality relative to other crops.
It's a feedback loop with regards to over-fertilization for other crops and reliance on flood/pivot irrigation that increases soil salinity levels thus requiring alfalfa to be planted. Of course, raising water-intensive crops in the San Juaquin is a topic of discussion for another day.
How about some skepticism re 80-year forecasts. Are there any 1940s forecasts for the 2020s that we now cite as near useful? Forecasts for 2100 presume that we know the future of technology? What are the odds?
Forecasts on the 1280s from the 1200s were very accurate. I suppose the question is whether you feel like we are in a long period of technological acceleration which will continue, or whether we were in a brief 300-year period of technological advancement due to a combination of right conditions which no longer exist (i.e. what Peter Thiel professes).
Things move much faster now than in 1200, especially technology.
The world of bits has changed drastically, yes, but the world of atoms is still fairly recognizable from ~1940. None of the following has changed by an order of magnitude: cost of energy, benefits of medicine, cost or speed of transportation, etc.
Think about medical science and life expectancies. I like today's.
Sure, the question isn't whether there's any improvement, but whether it will change so drastically that any predictions are pointless.
We may live to see how things go without working antibiotics. A bit more like before 1940, I presume.
I don't think that anyone predicted that the Mongols would conquer 1/3 of the world's population.
If we restrict the question to "What was new in science & technology in Western Europe in the 1200s?":
- Arabic numerals & arithmetic (Fibonacci, 1202)
- First book of magnetism (Maricourt, 1269)
- Multiple advances in crane technology: treadmill cranes and stationary harbor cranes
- Mechanical clocks
- Paper mills
- Eyeglasses
- Watermarks
- Spinning wheels
- Functional buttons, with buttonholes, which led to snug-fitting clothing
We could also look at the science & technology which existed in the late 1100s, but spread widely in the 1200s. This spread might have been predicted, although I'm not sure if anyone did:
- Universities
- Gothic architecture (pointed arches, rib vaults, flying buttresses, etc.), which allowed for taller buildings with more windows
- Compasses
- Ships' rudders mounted on the stern
- Blast furnace & cast iron
- Vertical windmills
- Wheelbarrows
- Paper
- Glass mirrors
- Rat traps
- Distilled liquor
There is a lot of technology that we take for granted. At some point, it was invented as was revolutionary at the time. Most centuries have some important technological advances, and these would have been hard to predict beforehand. In particular, the High Middle Ages (~1100-1300) was a period of rapid technological development in Europe.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_technology
I doubt that we would cite the old ones because more recent ones would likely be more useful. But I think the relevant question is how many 1940s forecasts are in the right ballpark, even if superseded. What were 1940s forecasts for global population, global economic output, global atmospheric balance, and change in global temperature? I know there was a period in the 1960s when some people thought the ice house cycle might come back soon, but I expect that atmospheric CO2 forecasts were actually pretty decent going back decades.
https://i.imgur.com/A8en1H4.jpeg
The prediction from Exxon 40 years ago was right on the money.
https://xkcd.com/2500/
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2805576-1982-Exxon-Memo-to-Management-About-CO2
It looks ominous, but that's because all the short-term daily and seasonal and even annual variation (which is far bigger) has been averaged out. Yikes, a trend! But you know, if we *hadn't* averaged out the daily trend, we could look at the temperature going up from 9am to 12pm and extrapolate that in a week we will all be in danger of evaporating. Clearly absurd, right? But that's what happens when you mistake a fluctuation for a trend, noise for signal.
Here's the problem: we don't know a priori *where* to stop averaging. If we stop at just one day, the season variations drown out any imaginable long-term trend. But if we go all the way up to averaging over centuries or millenia, then the trend since the last Ice Age shows zero sign of human intervention (naturally). If we stop at a few years, say about 5, then we don't see the short-term "noise" but we see what we think of as a "signal" with a characteristic time that is (curiously!) right about the size of our averaging window.
Unfortunately, there's 100% no way to know that's what's going on. We could just be looking at "noise" that simply happens to have a typical period of 10-50 years, and if we wait another century or two, it will jiggle its way back down (and our descendants will perhaps frantically search for something they're doing to cool the Earth). We already know the Earth's temperature experiences fluctuations on time scales from days to hundreds of thousands of years. There *is* no way to tell, just by looking at the temperature data all by itself, whether there is something caused by humans or not. It's like all the manipulations of stock market data that the finance crooks...er..pundits...do to sell n00bs on their wisdom. Look! If I smooth out the 200-day moving average and add back the bias caused by reverse claptrap bazinga, a clear trend emerges...!
That doesn't mean the data is worthless, of course. When *combined* with other data, and a solid mechanism that explains *why* this is the right smoothing window to use, you've got a useful theory. And people who argue global warming competently actually have done those things, so I am not arguing the theory is all crap. What I *am* saying is that people have a good sound basis for thinking that *that graph all by itself* proves exactly nothing.
The more productive adults in the world, the greater the world's wealth. As we get richer, more will be spent on all kinds of technological research including research that mitigates climate change.
Low fertility rates are one of the biggest economic challenges of rich countries. Since concern about the environment is a normal good meaning you care more about it the richer you get, anything making us relatively poorer will cause us to care less on average about climate change.
Citation needed. At least as regards per capita wealth.
What you're saying is clearly false in the limit, because available resources are finite. Given any population growth rate faster than cubic, eventually you will consume all the non-human resources inside a shell expanding at the speed of light. Claims that you'll get warp drive if you just have enough people thinking hard enough about it deserve zero consideration; it's probably outright impossible no matter how much want it.
Given any nonzero rate of technological progress, you will at the same time approach the omega point (where you have already invented and deployed all useful technology).
At that point, you are in a Malthusian condition where you not only get per capita stagnation, but you get an unlimited per capita DECLINE.
The extreme example I give is obviously not imminent or very relevant to current considerations, but it shows that it is not UNIVERSALLY true that more people lead to more wealth. Since it's not universally true, you have to do the work to show that it's true at the present time.
1+
"available resources are finite"
Citation needed.
Seriously, as the economy changes resources pop in and out of existence all the time. For example, the North Slope of Alaska 250 years ago only had Caribou, whales, fish, and certain berries and plants as natural resources. Then all of a sudden oil becomes useful and it suddenly contains hundreds of billions of dollars worth of resources. Someday the oil will either run out or will be replaced by alternative energy sources, and it will go back to just Caribou, whales, and fish. Meanwhile some other part of the world will have hundreds of billions of dollars worth of resources appear out of nowhere: maybe somewhere with lots of deuterium if fusion becomes a thing, but certainly something.
From my perspective, if you define resources as "materials useful to mankind" then as time has progressed resources have only increased, not decreased. Can you give me an example of a resource that we stopped using because it disappeared and not because it was no longer as useful as a resource opened up by new technology?
The citation is the theory of relativity. The resources available to you expand no faster than your light cone, which goes with the cube of time. Even if you exploit literally every bit of matter and energy available to you within the laws of physics, make use of every individual quark, lepton and photon, the number of them rises no faster than cubically.
If your population rises faster than cubically, then you will overtake the (per capita) resources inside your light cone. This is a mathematical certainty.
The only way to get out from under that is to either assume that you will get faster than light travel (which you won't), or that you will be able to advance technology and do "more with less"... to the point where the finite number ofl elementary particles available somehow gives you infinite output of whatever you're trying to produce (which it won't).
This isn't some kind of "this is what we've seen in the past" curve extrapolation thing. It's an argument from the actual laws of physics. And it's not from the last palltry 100,000 years, either. We can actually see what's been going on for billions of years, and those laws have always held. We have never seen a natural phenomenon that violates them.
... so I'd say the burden of proof is very firmly on you, and examples from the very short history of humanity aren't a reasonable request.
I think you guys are talking past each other. Nobody is arguing for endless exponential growth rates in either population or GDP.
The argument is that in modern, market-based economies, income and population have tended to grow together, and can reasonably be expected to continue to do so, unless conditions change. The explanation is that on the margin, new technologies, new sources of energy, new ways of creating wealth and new ways of solving human problems have been discovered. For over two hundred years the pace of technological/economic growth has been able to outrun any Malthusian headwinds. People have added or produced more value than they have consumed, on net, and despite an order of magnitude increase in population, incomes have gone up more than 10 fold (closer to 30x in developed nations), lifespans have doubled, health has improved, and freedom, equality of opportunity and education have been substantially improved.
I think you are right that this can’t continue forever. But we aren’t making decisions for eternity. We are talking about the next generation or two, and with these the recent trends are more important than billion-year light cones.
I think JM's comment is correct that the trend has been that wealthier people care a lot more about the climate than poorer people do. They can afford to worry about such broader issues.
Over the foreseeable future, the best course of action IMO would be to continue to grow wealthier and more technologically proficient, and then to use this wealth and technology to fund alternative energy sources and or CO2 extraction.
No, really, I entirely understand their argument. But the thing is that many people, including the person I was initially responding to, seem to like to act as if it's an absolute law of nature that you'll always be able to innovate your way around any major resource problem (or indeed any environmental impact problem; I'm going to lump those with "resource problems" in the rest).
The best argument you ever see for "innovation will always save us" is that it's been true so far. But that's been for a fairly short historical time... and it's treated as a conversation-ending "proof" that it'll be true forever.
So I'm trying to point out that it's CANNOT be forever. At some point conditions WILL change. Once that fact is out there, we can move on to the specific question of WHEN they will change.
The "light cone" argument is just an opener, to challenge the basic "we can grow forever" assumption.
In reality, I very much doubt that the limiting factor is going to be the amount of matter inside a shell expanding at the speed of light. Some other long-lasting, hard-to-avoid, and maybe permanent, resource limitation will probably present itself long before that point. But before that can be discussed, it has to be on the table, which means breaking the assumptin that resources will always be irrelevant.
It's not just hitting new resource limitations, though. In fact, resources are the SMALLER issue from my point of view. The curve can also be thrown off if the innovation slows down. There really is such a thing as a technological omega point. You don't necessarily know where it is until you get to it. You may also find that you approach the omega point for, say, food production or climate remediation, before you get near the "ultimate" omega point.
You can't really tell where you are on a logistic curve until you see an inflection, so trying to project that way is no good. But you CAN see that we have some rather precise mechanistic theories of how physics works. They're incomplete, but the places where they break down are way beyond our current technological operating space anyhow. So there's reason to worry that we may see a serious innovation slowdown. That is not a certainty, but it's a real concern, and history doesn't really serve to allay it.
I truly don't know when either resource or innovation limits will show up, but the conservative assumption is that it will be relatively soon, and the conservative response is at least not to rely on being saved from resource problems that you can actually see coming by new technologies that you can't even specifically name. If you keep rolling the dice like that, someday you'll lose.
I definitely don't think that the next generation or two is entirely off the table as a time to hit some limit that will cause real universal pain. Maybe that's not a reason to give up on reproduction, but it does at least seem like a reason not to get too worried if reproduction goes down. Breathing room is good.
I am also totally unmoved by the idea that you need more population to get more technological innovation to get you out of some hole you're digging. Even if you believe that the population is a linear factor in the "innovation rate", which I don't actually accept, the population is also a factor in the TIME you have available before you badly need the innovations, so at best increasing the population is a no-op.
Thanks, great elaboration. Other than more "breathing room", what would you suggest?
I guess I agree that population and innovation are not very closely tied together, at least so much so that I would recommend more kids as a means to more innovation. I do worry that population reductions can have negative effects on the economy, and that this could slow innovation and technological progress. Even here though, I would rather see more highly educated immigrants than more kids by worried progressives.
We are so below this constraint that it is not relevant at all.
Obviously, James meant his statements to apply "at current margins."
Also, if we're really going to invoke relativity here, note that the humans at the edge of the expansion would be traveling near the speed of light and thus have time run more slowly for them. The relevant timeslices, i.e. those corresponding to time as experienced by the humans themselves, actually have infinite volume.
(Not to mention that space itself is expanding... exponentially.)
The offset argument is so obvious that I don’t even understand what the counterargument is. People must assume that it’s impossible to offset emissions.
Most people simply do not think in cost/benefit terms. They think “emissions are BAD therefore you shouldn’t do them” and the idea of paying money to get permission to do a BAD thing seems wrong to them.
Isn’t that particular answer pretty obvious? You cannot offset murder because you are improving society but you cannot do anything to the damages that you inflicted on that single individual. Theoretically carbon emission hurt society and therefore can be immediately rectified directly by offsetting it. A very simple rule would be a directly undoing a harmful act is OK where returning benefit to “society” for a harmful act perpetrated on an identifiable individual is not.
Carbon is fungible. People aren't.
But you have to consider second-order effects on the fabric of society which allowing "murder offsets" would obviously introduce. Or, more pertinently, admit that you can't accurately model such effects, and that naive "shut up and calculate" utilitarianism is unworkable.
There surely were times when murder was a matter of negotiation. Either pay or accept retribution. Not only in Iceland. Next step was communal jurisdiction. The negotiation thing was better than clan wars. Back then, families or clans were working systems and states were nascent. Now there are more or less working states and maybe a nascent earth law.
A lot of people are OK with murdering people that have violated certain laws, like murdering other people. So you could say we are willing offset the murder of a murderer because we think more people will benefit from that murderer not being alive.
First, the cost of offsetting a child's carbon cost is currently very high. Scott brings it down by making assumptions about future technology and suggesting that you would start offsetting when your child is an adult, i.e. about twenty years after the emissions began. If you are seriously worried about climate change destabilizing industrial civilization before the end of this century, then taking carbon out ten years (on average) after it went in probably doesn't seem so great, especially if that strategy is founded on the idea that technological progress will continue on its current trend line. And even Scott's $30,000 figure is too high for some people--that could easily be a 10% or greater increase in the cost of raising and educating a child to a middle class standard, depending on where you live and how much of their own college costs they cover/get scholarships for.
Second, I think you're right that most people are unaware of the idea of offsetting emissions (and other costs), at least as an option for individuals. They may not think it's literally impossible, but it doesn't cross their minds. Certainly almost no prospective parents have looked into its actual cost.
Third, the counterargument to offsets in general (not to paying to remove carbon from the atmosphere or do some other good thing, but to thinking of that as the price for your other behavior) is simple: supposing that I'm willing to spend $X on carbon offsets, why shouldn't I spend the $X and _also_ not raise the (assumed to be net-environmentally-damaging) child? Obviously this generalizes to "Why should I ever do anything for myself rather than for others?", and everyone has to find their own point of balance as far as that question is concerned: a way of roughly minimizing both subjective costs to yourself and material costs to the world. If the subjective cost of abstaining from children is about equal to the market price of the offset, then offsetting it exactly makes sense. If it is much less, then you shouldn't have kids. If it is much greater, than you should have kids and then do something else to fight climate change, but thinking in terms of offsets doesn't get you anywhere in particular.
Those are good points. I think that $30,000 over a lifetime is really low, even if Scott is off by 10x it's pretty easy to achieve - over a lifetime with 50 years of work $300,000 is $6,000/yr. If you look at median salary or average salary that might be a lot but realistically the people pondering not having kids because of climate make much more.
Btw a funny argument is that people with children probably fly less and are more stuck in place and therefore might produce less carbon. My anecdotal experience is that my friends with children probably spend a whole lot less carbon, but I could be wrong.
Generally speaking, the idea of not having children just seems really pessimistic about the value your children will bring into the world. I assume that my children have the potential to bring a lot of positive impact, easily offsetting the carbon that they use.
This would make for a very interesting analysis. I would say in my case, we have travelled a lot less since having our kid. We also eat in the house a lot more, which I am sure reduces carbon, and our entertainment has been more focused on parks and being outside than attractions that would likely have higher carbon footprints. A very interesting thought.
Furthermore, offsetting creates an artificial link between the bad that is done and the good that is done to "offset" the bad. Assume that you think climate change is pretty bad, and a good reason for not having kids (because having kids makes climate change worse) - but not the most important thing, and not the cause where your money can do the most good. Then if having a kid means you suddenly have more money to spend on doing good than before, you shouldn't use it to buy carbon offsets, but instead put it where it yields the most utility. But having a kid, despite believing that it's kinda bad, and "offsetting" that by funding AI risk research or whatever doesn't quite have the same emotional appeal.
My sense is that the people who answer "I am choosing not to have children because of climate change" disproportionately belong to the very-liberal group of "I am a 35 year-old-woman without children yet, and am convincing myself that this was a good conscious decision."
Citation needed.
I think he clarified pretty well his source, as "My sense."
That would be my sense too. IOW, it is at least in part a rationalization of what some people have already decided to do.
Thank you very much for this article. I am having a hard time lately, and worrying about climate change and how it will affect the future life of my son often made me feel bad, helpless and even irresponsible for having kids at all. I do not have the time or brain to argue with anybody of this friendly community, but I feel obliged to tell you that your thoughts on this topic helped me feel better. Thank you very much!
Climate anxiety is a thing and will probably become more mainstream before/unless things get better.
I'm semi-early here, so pointing out some small text errors; in the Venus paragraph:
> but I don’t think they’d admit to being they’re not 100% sure either
And a little further:
> I think point is true more generally
(I used to not make comments like this because I thought someone else probably will, and it feels insubstantial; turns out, often, no one actually does, and I noticed I take writing that contains simple errors less seriously.)
I'm reminded again of C.S. Lewis's "how will the bomb find you?" essay. It was quoted a fair bit in light of coronavirus fears, but I think it applies even better to climate change: <https://www.crossroads.net/media/articles/how-will-the-bomb-find-you>
> In one way we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. ‘How are we to live in an atomic age?’ I am tempted to reply: ‘Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year [...]; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.
> In other words, do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. Believe me, dear sir or madam, you and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented… It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances and in which death itself was not a chance at all, but a certainty.
> [...]
> If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs.
To be clear, this doesn't preclude advocating sensible policies about climate change (or sensible precautions against a virus), any more than C.S. Lewis would have opposed sensible policies about nuclear weapons.
But I think this question of "can I even have children" speaks to a way that people are being eaten by fear over climate change in a way that goes beyond mere sensible policies.
Thanks for this.
I've always loved that quote, thanks for reminding me of it.
Gosh darn it, I lived through the 70s once already, it would be nice if - like impoverished inspiration in fashion trends - it didn't keep getting recycled.
I am of the generation that had scare stories fed to us that by the time we were all grown up in the year 1980-1990, we'd all be eating rats (or each other) while we froze in our hovels in an overcrowded, resource-denuded planet.
Well, tell me people, when was *your* last meal of frozen rat?
This is just one of the best-sellers of the time (between these, disaster movies, and the fashion sense of the decade, it was sure some experience):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Population_Bomb
I felt at the time, and I still feel, that a lot of the "it would be terribly irresponsible to have children" rhetoric was based on selfishness. Some of it was based on principle and ideals, certainly, but the people going on about the shrinking resources certainly didn't want to stop having sex, or living comfortable First World Western lives, whereas if they had really meant it they should all have emulated the Desert Fathers.
"Climate change" is just the new "overpopulation", "oil will run out", and the rest of the scary stories of my childhood.
All of them do have to do with the resources and consumption of the human population on Earth, so they do all focus on a very related sense of issues.
Eh...it's all good. The future by definition will be inhabited by the offspring of people who are today enthusiastic about children, who think whatever comes our way can be worked out, given a bit of hard work and pulling together.
But also people who can't work a condom, or can't be bothered. I wish I were as optimistic as you about what natural selection brings...
And also people who give in to pressure from their families, friends, and the larger culture.
That's pretty much almost everybody already. Very few people defy all three forces on any substantial issue, and an incredibly tiny sliver do so on more than one. We are a very social species. Even our fiercest "dissents" are largely ritualized and functionally vacuous.
My comment is neither optimistic nor pessimistric per se, I'm just observing that the genes that survive to the far distant future are pretty much by definition those that code for aggressive propagation.
But with respect to intelligence, I don't think natural selection has favored that in humans for millenia, at least, probably more like 50-100,000 years or more, since we lived in groups larger than a family. I think over that period natural selection has favored intelligent that hews close to the median, for reasons of social cohesion and belonging. That is probably *why* it's a normal distribution with a rather small standard deviation.
The good news there is that it's likely the future will be no *stupider* in addition to being no more intelligent.
How did you reach the conclusion that higher than average intelligence has not been selected for lately? And how did you determine that intelligence has a small standard deviation?
Well, firstly the IQ distribution is a Guassian, whereas if IQ were a determinative survival advantage I would expect it to have a long exponential tail to the upside, sort of the way the distribution of income in a country does (the so-called Pareto distribution). The fact that IQ drops off far more sharply than an exponential suggests there is some *disadvantage* to being well above the mean intelligence. And I would add personal observation is consistent with that: very smart people in my observation tend to be nontrivially socially disadvantaged, and I can readily believe their reproductive success is lower. We are a very social species, and it seems likely "fitting in" in terms of your attitudes and behavior, and being predictable, are greater reproductive advantages than just being super duper smart.
As for the second, because if we're going to measure intelligence on a universal scale, on which planaria, chimps, humans, and hypothetical Vulcans all fit, then 15 IQ points is a very small width. There's a big empty gap between us and the chimps, and between the chimps and the next smartest species, et cetera.
The fact that intelligence is rather distributed like human height -- where we all cluster around a mean value with a Gaussian distribution reflective of random error in "hitting" the mean -- but nobody is 18 inches high and no one is 14 feet high -- would suggest to me that intelligence, like height, is a "design" characteristic: we are designed to be IQ 100, just as we are designed to be a certain height and giraffes a different height. And as I said, that makes sense from the point of view of a highly social species where reproductive advantage depends critically on social value, and more on the success of collective ventures than individual brilliance, at least over the long term and in the absence of extraordinary threat/opportunity.
Oh, you don't need to convince me that high intelligence is currently not being selected for in Western societies; I'm already quite convinced that we are currently undergoing selection for lower intelligence, as the negative correlation between educational attainment and fitness is well established. But that does not mean that there hasn't been selection for higher intelligence during the last 100k years, and I wonder what explanation other than selection for higher intelligence you propose for the differences that exist between populations that have split within that timeframe.
I'm in that same generation, and I remember NO such scare stories. None. Not with those dates attached. Not unless you count speculative fiction or obviously sensationalistic tabloid-style media bullshit, which would be unfair and unreasonable to do in the context of a serious discussion. Actually, for 1980-1990, I don't think I ever even saw anything like that in in media, only fiction.
I do remember being seriously told by some Time-Life book that I'd be able to buy a ticket to the moon by 1985, but not that there'd be an environmental collapse by then.
As for reality, these things play out over centuries.
On that timescale, and even if you freeze things at the current population and the current per capita impact, the jury is still out about whether we're over one or another of the critical carrying capacities... and, if we are, on whether there's anything we can do about it just by feasible modifications to the "impact" term. A planet doesn't fall apart that fast.
The population scare was going in the sixties, when Ehrlich wrote _The Population Bomb_ claiming that there would be famines in the 1970's with hundreds of millions dead, and it was already too late to stop it. That was at the high end of population orthodoxy at the time, but clearly being taken seriously.
Oy. Were you at an Antarctic research station for the entirety 1971-80? You don't remember "Silent Spring," the movie "Silent Running," the Energy Crisis, Nuclear Winter, mercury in the tuna, Love Canal, Greenpeace boats ramming Japanese whalers, Earth Day? Here's a trip down memory lane:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7OHG7tHrNM
Yes, I at least remember all of those things. No, I don't remember any one of those things saying that I was going to be living in a hut and eating frozen rats. I don't remember of them coming anywhere close to involving any scenario anhthing like that.
Silent Spring: I didn't read it, but as I recall it was about DDT wiping out birds by thinning eggshells. Yes, it was probably overblown. Yes, a total ban on DDT was probably an overreaction. On the other hand, the amount of DDT that was being thrown all over the place really was a problem. More nuanced controls might have been better than a ban, but a ban was probably better than the status quo. And there was no claim about frozen rats.
Silent Running: Isn't that some kind of submarine movie? Like, fiction? I didn't see it. I thought it was about nuclear submarines, actually. Did it presuppose a nuclear war as a precondition for whatever I was talking about? Was there a nuclear war that I didn't notice? Because if there was no nuclear war, it's kind of irrelevant.
Energy Crisis: Again, no claim about frozen rats. There were sure some pretty high gas prices. And sure enough, Jimmy Carter was dead right about it being dumb to become increasingly dependent on oil. That's caused real problems ever since, not with shortages so much as with getting into wars you don't want to get into. Oh, and of course there's the whole climate change thing now, so it's still a problem even after spending the effort to develop domestic sources. It's a shame people didn't actually follow through more. It's also a shame Cart and others made the anti-nuclear mistake, but that was a bit more understandable at the time.
Nuclear Winter: I guess that might have had frozen rats, but it was also kind of conditional on, you know, nuclear war. Which I still don't remember happening.
Mercury in the tuna: Fish still have not-necessarily-ideal levels of mercury, to the point where people are told to limit consumption... although the rules are probably a bit over-conservative. But even if the mercury doesn't matter at ALL and the rules are totally unsupportable, I still don't remember that either I or the tuna were ever supposed to be reduced to eating frozen rats.
Love Canal: Local issue. Never any claims about frozen rats even locally. I understand it was a genuine mess if you lived there, though.
Greenpeace: So many species of whales were NOT hunted nearly to extinction? And there isn't STILL a consensus that there need to be tight restrictions to keep that from happening? That's news to me, because I thought all of that actually happened. In any case, I don't eat a lot of whale and would be unlikely to substitute frozen rats.
Earth Day: Were there frozen rats on sticks at the hippie fairs? I didn't go.
Well, if we average Deiseach's hyperbole and your oh-shucks-you-mean-*that* minimization, we come pretty close to my memory of the 70s. So that's progress.
Part of the problem is distinguishing between the science and the popular media presentation. If you actually read the IPCC reports, they are not predicting catastrophe, just some bad things happening. But the popular version has climate change threatening at least civilization, possibly species survival. I think there was a similar division in the sixties with regard to population, with Ehrlich's hundreds of millions starving to death in the seventies at the high end of respectable opinion.
Oh, by the way, a lot of those things actually provoked action. If we're standing on the train tracks, and you remark that a train is coming, and so we both step off of the tracks and the train misses us, then I don't get to complain afterwards that you were panicking about the train.
I remember our family having a copy of "The Population Bomb" in the 1970s, predicting gigadeath famines in the 1980s. And I remember high school in the early 1980s, being taught the same thing but with the collapse of civilization pushed back to the 1990s unless we did everything exactly right (meaning world socialism and extreme austerity). I also remember that they gave us the "Club of Rome" model to play with, convinced that we would be convinced by the sciencey truthiness of a Genuine Computer Forecast that this was inevitable no matter what we did, and then figuring out what relatively straightforward technological developments would nonetheless enable a hundred years of continued growth. IIRC the teacher let me pass that class with a C-.
And of course I remember what Soylent Green is made out of.
It was absolutely a thing, and not an isolated or obscure thing, in the 1970s.
the world3 model is still relevant, given they pdate it in 2020 and it still gave the same results. also i would prefer not leaving existential threats to the species to a "someone will fix it" thing.
Correct. And it goes back a good deal farther — the scare that drove the eugenics movement was that the stupid were outbreeding the smart, I think a little earlier was running out of topsoil.
" The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace in a continual state of alarm (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing them with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."
(H.L.Mencken)
The population bomb was avoided by the green revolution, as well as the policies of countries like Chhina which suggests there was something of a 'notiin and avoiding a problem'. And countries *do* have famines.
Thanks for this article, Scott - I have a few friends who want kids themselves, but who have found themselves being talked down to by joyless scolds who will denounce them (to their faces, in public) for wanting to have kids, and insisting they would be deeply wrong to do so, for climate-related reasons. (I hope people like this are not also problems in other people's circles.)
I've shared this article with them, and I hope it'll be helpful to them. We'll see - the apocalypts might be beyond persuasion, but still, this should add a little more sanity to the conversation. So, thank you once again.
This is part of the “argument” about getting climate change predictions right where the result of underestimating the damage and not being willing to incur ANY cost at all and overestimating the damage and taking counterproductive steps – measure that cost more than the damage they prevent. So far this has not happened on any big scale that I know of, but it could and “not having children” would fall into that category.
Within this argument however, there is a sub argument in which overestimating the damage leads to rejecting the least cost way of avoiding the damage – a net tax on CO2 emissions (and use of that parameter in guiding public investments that affect CO2 emissions) because, paradoxically, a tax as seen as “too little” and a sure sign that the proposer does not take climate change "seriously."
There’s a niche population in which carbon taxes are seen as unserious. But that population is shrinking. The bigger problem the carbon tax faces is that median voters hate it with a passion and are far more willing to vote for things that hurt themselves more, like bans on coal or other strict regulations, as long as the costs are slightly hidden.
Having a hard time writing replies here that aren’t full of snark and anger. Thank you, Scott, for being a good example of writing positive, earnest arguments against our atrocious intellectual leadership, and their terrible arguments.
To be fair I don't think our leadership is saying this. This is a grassroots belief.
What do you think of this quote from dune:
Muad'Dib: "If a child, an untrained person, an ignorant person, or an insane person incites trouble, it is the fault of authority for not predicting and preventing that trouble."
If bad beliefs are widespread, to me this is, de facto, the fault of intellectual leadership.
This is why I would hate living in the Dune universe. I have no need for any God-damned intellectual leadership, I am perfectly capable of thinking leading thoughts all by myself, and moreover if those thoughts don't quite comport with the Zeitgeist, I insist -- the the point of rudeness, if not a poke in someone's eye with a sharp stick -- on the liberty of having them anyway, and to hell with what the majority thinks or prefers.
On the other hand, I *would* really like some competent managers who can ensure that the potholes are fixed, air-traffic control is efficient, borders are secure, weights and measures uniform, court cases speedily adjudicated -- all the kind of plain-jane work-a-day stuff for which we constituted government circa 1776. No genius required, just attention to detail and duty.
Alas, it seems these days I get tons of "intellectual leadership" from the folks I send to the capital -- lotsa speeches about How Things Ought To Be, and The Right Kind of Thinking -- and precious little of getting the maintenance work done on time and under budget. Bah.
I share your preferences here. But i get the impression that most people don't, because these are unpopular preferences.
What do you think of the argument that "leadership of _some kind_ is inevitable, because most people outsource much of their thinking to others, and this really just makes sense as another form of specialization?"
Personally, i would prefer that if we did have intellectual leaders, they be consistent winners of vibrant prediction markets. That's the only kind of leadership i'd be willing to listen to.
Yes, political leadership is inevitable. I'm torn between desiring it be the most incompetent racked with pox and cupidity, on the one hand, so that The People, bless their hearts, are scarred enough to avoid some of the deadlier strains of the collectivist nightshade poison, and desiring it be some selfish but canny bastard who will use the power entirely for his own welfare but begrudgingly pave the streets and keep the post office running in order to buy time for his get-rich schemes to mature. The predations of the scurriless are as nothing compared to the havoc wreaked by the noble pursuers of Justice For All so the cost doesn't bother me -- the US Federal Government could afford a President who handed out $100 million/year sinecures to his 10 best friends annually forever, and it would be a bargain compared to the latest Great Quixote Society project doomed to fail only after sending $5 trillion in good savings up in flame. I dunno, I don't have any great ideas. In the 1900s you could up sticks and move to America, where they mostly left you the hell alone, but there's no where to go now.
Are you a bitcoiner?
I would be much much much more pessimistic about the world if not for bitcoin. Because bitcoin does exist, i am optimistic that the world will 'fall into' a more libertarian state of affairs. Not that people will vote for it, or that "experts" will be necessary to make it happen - this is based upon a belief that the means of life you are describing ultimately outcompetes other forms, but it simply requires sufficient technology which previously didn't exist.
The existence of bitcoin means it's now possible to hold and transmit large amounts of value without relying on any state authority or court system. That is a complete game-changer in terms of what it means for communities of human beings who simply want to live and work in peace.
Bitcoin brings the kind of tax-avoidance schemas once only available to the super-rich, to everyone. It makes confiscatory approaches impossible to scale, because now you can transact globally without relying on any one company. You can save several lifetime's worth of earnings, and if you do it right, nobody will know you have it. And if someone wants to steal from you, they can't do so without your concent. They could _kill_ you, but they still couldn't take that value from you. Bitcoin dramatically lowers the incentive for committing violence, and raises the cost of warfare. We printed enough money in the last two years, to fund something like afghanistan wars.
I think the end result of all this will be a flight of capital away from coercive systems of control, and thus a newer, more peaceful, more cooperative future. Power will largely be held locally, and it'll be impossible to cobble together coherent hierarchies without everyone involved agreeing that they want to be in the hierarchy, since the cost of defecting will go down _dramatically_.
I just reread Dune, and I don't recall that one at all. Do you recall the context?
It sounds more like it's from Children of Dune or Dune Messiah.
I found a very similar quote from *Jessica* Atreides in Dune, but speaking specifically of the little troublemaker Alia rather than generic "children".
It sounded vaguely like one of those things Paul said in the many meetings of the Imperial Council that were written about in the two (immediate) sequels. He used to say things that would scandalize Irulan, and sort of indirectly his "conventional square" readers of the early 70s, and that would be one of them.
The Founders Pledge, which is extremely committed to fighting climate change, produced a report that effectively reaches the same conclusion. Seems very relevant to share here.
https://founderspledge.com/stories/climate-and-lifestyle-report
Quote:
"What we are not saying: [...]
3. We are not saying that you should or shouldn’t have children: We mostly discuss this example since it has been discussed heavily in prior work and we believe prior analyses have significantly overstated the impact of this choice."
Thanks! I hadn't seen that before.
If carbon footprint is the determining factor, then why is nuclear energy so reviled? The constant marginalizing of nuclear energy by imposing unbearable burdens of costly regulations far beyond those which are reasonable forces the use of fossil fuels. The carbon impact of substituting fossil fuel with nuclear for power generation is massively beyond that of any realistic decrease in nativity. Presuming people are rational, this would point to anti-natalism being the true motivation behind the push to reduce birthrates.
It is rationally impossible to take pleas for decreasing carbon output seriously when the only real alternative is a-priori banned from consideration. This is a quagmire of the self-designated pro-environment movement's own creation. Lobby gov to impose impossible regulatory burdens on nuclear energy, making fossil fuel the only economically viable alternative for stable power generation, then wail about how fossil fuels are destroying the world. Zero credibility.
It’s almost as if changing the climate is not that important.
Well, not as important as changing the way we are governed, anyway.
If I'm being charitable, the problem is that those who overregulate nuclear power while decrying climate change are caught between two competing motives. The first, more well established, motive is that climate change is very bad and we should do something about it such as swapping away from fossil fuels. The second motivator, though, is that nuclear disasters are very flashy and high-profile. No one wants to be the company running the next Fukushima, and nobody wants to be living in the next irradiated area.
Scott has written about similar effects in the medical industry in the past, where drugs known to cause slight increases in heart attacks are prescribed so often that it's practically certain that some deaths are a result of the drug, but nobody will prescribe a drug that has orders of magnitude less chance to cause sudden liver (iirc) failure. The increase in heart attacks blend into the background noise, but the flashy organ failure can be easily blamed on an individual doctor's choice of prescription.
Obviously there are ways to mitigate the danger of nuclear energy, and I agree that we really need to start using it. But as long as people don't want to risk a careless worker upending their lives, it's going to be hard to convince some people that this actually is a great option. In the mean time, we'll have to settle for other options for green energy.
I applaud your charity.
What is your less charitable view?
The less charitable view would probably look similar, except it would assume less intelligence on their part and quickly dissolve down to something like "I don't want a Chernobyl-style meltdown in my city!" That, or a herd mentality where they talk about renewables and not nuclear because that's all they ever hear talked about.
"Presuming people are rational"
Well that's a rather large assumption.
Well we have to, otherwise why bother even speaking? But the point is taken. Perhaps I can rephrase it as "To the degree we can presume people are rational, this would [...]".
Among the people for whom carbon footprint is a major consideration, I don’t think nuclear power is reviled at all. The people who revoke nuclear power are people who think lots and lots of other things trump carbon footprints, and who have an inaccurate view about the direct harms of various energy sources.
That would appear to be the case.
That would seem to be the actual point. Those who revile nuclear power desire to shoe-horn many other things into an alleged attempt to reduce carbon footprint. The problem being that those who don't like the 'many other things' end up resisting the carbon reduction too, because of all the other things that have been arbitrarily included in the package.
It would seem that those for whom the carbon footprint of mankind is in fact the main consideration are in the minority, since the massive power-grab being attempted in the name of carbon reduction has not even tried to unpack the stuff that has been added on.
I am very concerned about carbon emission and the unrecoverable loss of free oxygen, but the intentional politization of the question has caused fatal harm to the goal of carbon reduction.
Because the modern environmentalist movement grew out of the cold-war era nuclear disarmament movement.
If that is the case, I wonder if the movement serves similar geopolitical purposes as did the disarmament movement did, rather than the purpose most of its genuine adherents believe it serves?
It is widely reviled in large part because it is widely believed to be insanely dangerous at approximately the same level that climate change is believed to be insanely dangerous. This belief is false, and clearly false in a way that concerns about the reliability of IPCC reports are not. But most people can't reasonably assess either an IPCC report or a nuclear energy safety assessment (or a Phase III clinical trial of a vaccine, for that matter); they have to just trust a respected authority to do it for them and eventually file it under "this is just plain true and only liars ever say otherwise, so don't listen to them".
How we got to that place is irrelevant, and I don't feel like playing the blame game today. If there were a quick or easy way to get back from that place, that would be relevant but I don't know of any. If there are presently people who know better but are inciting nucleophobia for cynical or otherwise hidden motives, that also would be relevant but I don't think it is presently a major factor. Mostly, people are erroneous but sincere.
"Why is nuclear energy so reviled?"
Jason Crawford's review of Jack Devanney's book "Why Nuclear Power Has Been a Flop" is probably relevant: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ThvvCE2HsLohJYd7b/why-has-nuclear-power-been-a-flop
The argument my wife and I settled on was "it's bad for civilization to have a demographic crash at precisely the time it's trying to transition to a carbon-free economy". I still think this is a potent argument, but I think Scott's political one is more urgent.
I find this framing very useful.
I find it completely implausible that anyone *actually* has or doesn't have children because of climate change, regardless of what they may say on the subject. People rationalize a whole lot of stuff they do in response to subterranean primitive drives or personal desires with fancy philosophical arguments, and I would assume without strong contrary evidence that's what's going on here.
If you don't want to have kids because you haven't yet grown up yourself, or you're incapable of forming the necessary sexual attachment, or your own family provides a horrifying warning example, then it would seem considerably more psychologically comfortable to assert that the reason is a noble selfless concern for the impact on the general welfare. Ego-defense bullshit seems a far more economical explanation for the data than a shocking increase in the degree to which the canonical American considers the impact on Bangladesh of his lifestyle choices.
Sure, but it's also where you'd find people with a superb ability to rationalize emotional drive as actually really the epitome of cool reason, so...kind of a wash, really. Intellectuals are like that. Generally capable of amazing insight into others, but also frequently more naive about their own true motives than people 2 standard deviations in IQ below. When you have a brain that can use language and logic exquisitely, it can be used to peel away the layers of bullshit other people construct to obscure things they find embarassing, but of course it can also be used to construct obscuring layers of bullshit around those things *you* find embarassing. Double-edged sword.
A related and weirder population argument is that the more people there are, the worse that climate austerity will have to be. If we have too many kids, they’ll have to live in apartments and ride bicycles. Better that they not even exist, so that their siblings can have lives worth living, i.e. giant houses in the exurbs and SUVs.
Strongly agree with the thrust of this argument, but I think you don't go far enough in 2 places:
1. Do those maps of sea level rise assume no human acts to mitigate it? Plenty of places today are below sea level but still dry. Manhattan real estate surely must be valuable enough that we'd do more dutch-style water management, rather than give up billion-dollar skyscrapers?
2. Economic growth is continuing alongside climate change. Even if it does cost trillions of dollars, future generations are likely to be far richer, not poorer, than we are.
I've seriously wondered about this first point too. If the Dutch in the Middle Ages could make half a country, if you can stand next to skyscrapers in Boston built on what used to be water, is it really that hard to protect 10% of Manhattan, or Miami for that matter? The answer might well be yes, maybe it's easier to build new land above sea level than protect buildings on what becomes lower than sea level, but it doesn't seem obviously true to me either way.
I believe something like 20-30% of Manhattan is already built on land reclaimed from the water.
The Dutch didn't have to pass the NEPA process
The big risk with Climate Change is that we may devote tremendous resources towards the wrong mitigation, or that the measures selected may make actually make things worse.
The cost of land reclamation, or sea walls is tiny compared to the costs of 'de-carbonification'. But building a levee will actually solve a problem, while there is no guarantee that upending the global economy will change the climate to a helpful degree.
What we do know for sure is that prematurely ceasing fossil fuel use is almost guaranteed to immiserate millions of people.
the water moves around actually, which might flood say Bangladesh more depending on how many sea walls are built....
Yes that is absolutely right. Most of New Orleans is currently below sea level. However, at a certain point, the costs of protecting some land become greater than the costs of abandoning it. It’s unlikely to trace the lines indicated in these maps, but these maps at least give you an indication of the cost.
And in any case, Scott’s point here is that these lines on the map are the upper bound on how much land is lost given reasonable sea level forecasts, and if the truth is less than that, then it strengthens his point that life is still worth living, even if the lower east side is smaller than you remembered as a kid.
Definitely agreed, it's an upper bound as you say. I would be delighted to reduce that upper bound further, is all; I think the vision of city blocks being lost to the sea is a powerful and motivating one, and if it's false I'd want to know.
My intuition is that urbanised land is so valuable that for any realistic amount of sea level rise, we'll be able to protect it rather than see it flood - but I'm a no-nothing outsider so I'd be very interested to find what the expert consensus is on this.
For many creatures, difficult times lead to lower fecundity. Humans are no exception. The excuse of climate change gives delicious feelings of self-righteous, moral sacrifice, but I'd assume most people are actually foregoing procreation because now it is more acceptable to be childless. And the expectations for parenting are getting ridiculous. In California, rising living costs are making solidly middle-class jobs like teachers or nurses into low-class jobs. So if you want your kid to have the American dream you have to be sure he becomes an MD or a programmer.
Or get out of California…
This is a slight tangent, but my friend AB pointed out to me that CO2 itself is poisonous even at sub-1% concentrations. And is projected to get to approximately that concentration in the next century.
So there's a question here: are we being dumb? Or on current projections will the atmosphere really become poisonous without us doing something drastic? At current-best-carbon-capture technology we'd need to spend a fair portion of the world's GDP exclusively on it, which I guess is perfectly do-able... and I guess it gets much cheaper when you increase concentrations... but...
More interestingly, the meta-question: why don't I hear about this from anywhere? It's very scary (rising sea levels just mean you move somewhere higher if you're rich -- the atmosphere being toxic means you die or we live in a dystopia where you don't go outside) but also DOESN'T REQUIRE man-made global-warming... even if man-made-global-warning doesn't exist, this effect is still there and is still even scarier than anything you get from man-made-global-warming. It's also obvious (unless the answer to the question above is "yes, you're an idiot") -- and you can't solve it WITHOUT solving man-made-global-warming... It seems like a much better argument to me than anything else that is being used. So what gives?
Minor correction: people get "the next century" using climate models. Just looking at the current rate of production you get 300 years before it's near 1%. Note that this page which gives that estimate https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/climate-change-atmospheric-carbon-dioxide doesn't mention that CO2 is itself toxic to humans. I'm pretty confused.
> CO2 itself is poisonous even at sub-1% concentrations
This is not at all well established. (How did you come to accept it as fact?) Which is why it's not widely reported. There were a few studies claiming cognitive decline at <1%, but so far the evidence level isn't strong.
Relevant ACX: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/eight-hundred-slightly-poisoned-word
Relevant Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide#Toxicity
Indoor CO2 concentrations are regularly much higher than atmospheric concentrations. If there is a toxicity problem, it will be indoors. If indoor air isn’t often toxic today, then atmospheric air won’t be for centuries. Maybe increased atmospheric concentrations will make it easier for indoor air to reach toxic levels. But the effects of direct CO2 toxicity to us are surely less than the heating effects, the ocean pH effects, and probably a few other effects we also are ignoring.
I think you've misplaced a decimal point. A 1% concentration is 10,000 ppm. That's an order of magnitude higher than anyone expects.
Well your friend AB is wrong. The CO2 concentration inside your own lungs is way higher than that already. CO2 is poisonous at above 20-40% concentration, yes, even in the presence of sufficient oxygen, for reasons that aren't entirely clear. But at 1%? Nonsense. Submariners breathe that concentration and more for 6 months at a time.
I don't think you're going far enough, Scott. If the economy continues to grow at 2% a year, our grandchildren will live lives much better than ours, even while able to spend trillions on climate mitigation measures every single year.
I hear these folks saying that choosing to not have children is a sign of moral/emotional deficiency.
Admittedly, I have chosen to not have children, and mostly because I didn't want to. It seemed to me that children were a great deal of work and the job should be left to people who had a strong desire to do it.
I consider myself very fortunate to have lived in a time and place when I was free to choose to not have children.
When I hear people say that if anyone chooses to not have children, it must be because of laziness or selfishness, I suspect they believe having children is a bad deal, a lot of work for insufficient reward, and they don't want other people to get away without suffering as much.
Please note, I'm not talking about people who are happy to have children, or even people who are happy to have children and believe it would be a good idea for everyone. I'm talking very specifically about the people who attack those who choose to not have children.
I agree.
As a parent of many children, I heartily applaud anyone who makes a clear-headed decision not have kids. Being a parent is *hard* and doing it well means sacrificing a *lot* of personal desires. Don't get into it if you can't fully commit to all of the drawbacks.
Thank you, glad to see this point
I am always annoyed by this type of ad hominem
If people who want children say those who don't are rationalizing their lack of courage/willpower/emotional stablility, one can of course reply that all arguments for having children are rationalizations for the selfish primal desires of propagating one's genes, or whatever.
But in the end, everyone will just feel more angry and superior, and the debate will not have progressed in the slightest
So well said: "It seemed to me that children were a great deal of work and the job should be left to people who had a strong desire to do it."
Out of curiosity, were/are you married and did you and your partner decide to not have kids? Or have you been single and decided to never pursue a relationship that would have had the potential to yield children?
The latter.
I'm sort of one of the people you're addressing here, in that I don't want kids and the climate is *one* reason why not.
The core reason this is all "correct but not the way I think about it" is that for me, and I assume for most people, the decision to have children is almost purely an emotional one. Practical considerations weigh in - for example, I simply couldn't afford a child without substantial hardship for many years - but they could be overcome if the emotional case was there. I'm aware that's not a rationalist position, but I think it's fair to say that having a kid is a case where emotion should play a big role.
Climate is an excellent proxy for the overall "how does the future *feel*" component of this emotional decision. The emotional case just feels bad. I don't feel positive about the future, and even being a privileged resident of the first world seems tenuous and subject to change within a generation. I'm not confident that the US will be immune to deprivation and violence in the decades to come, especially for those who aren't wealthy.
You claim with the CA water example that if people are suffering from basic privation, resource allocations will change. I think this is probably true in an aggregate/stable long-term state sense, but there are already counterexamples - access to safe water is *already* a major problem for millions of Americans, and the response has been very angry but extremely inadequate in any practical terms.
California also suffers from a shortage of another basic need - housing - and their responses to that blatant crisis have ranged from tepid to actively harmful for at least 20 years. It reminds me of that quote about the stock market - "the market can remain irrational longer than you can stay solvent." Could it take CA 20 years to stop devoting its water to alfalfa while the poor suffer? Yeah... that seems extremely plausible.
This is well said: "Climate is an excellent proxy for the overall "how does the future *feel*" component of this emotional decision."
I wonder if in prior eras that people who felt less confident, more anxious, more pessimistic about their future and their potential children's capacity to flourish in it had those doubts swamped by social pressure to procreate. But as that social pressure has decreased over time, it allows more room for people with those sorts of feelings to let those feelings lead rather than what would have previously been the larger fear of social ostracism.
In prior eras, if people felt pessimistic about their future and their potential children's capacity to flourish in it, did they regard that as a reason not to have children? Or rather as a reason to have many children, so that at least some of them survive?
> I’d guess maybe a 1% chance that we end up like Venus.
Note that this guess massively overestimates things.
Yes, technically on scale of about 1 billion years it will happen (due to Sun increased output).
But chance of "we end up like Venus" happening within 200 years are zero.
Or basically zero if you give space for stuff like "Sun increases power by 50% for some unexpected, unpredicted and very unlikely reason" or "aliens visit and fuck with us".
Again, I think 99% chance you're right, but I'm curious why you are so sure there isn't going to be some kind of horrible runaway global warming where increased temperatures cause increased release of methane from deposits in a vicious cycle that ratchets us up to Venus really quickly. Is it because you haven't heard that theory or because you've seen really good evidence against it?
Wiki is your friend: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runaway_greenhouse_effect#Earth. Ignore the bit about Hansen.
Clarke: "If an elderly but distinguished scientist says..."
(but I actually hadn't seen that, so thanks!)
Good point. There's a lot of space between "miserable climate on Earth for most people" and a genuine moist runaway greenhouse. Things can get really bad for a lot of people without literally becoming uninhabitable.
The really good evidence against it is that it hasn't happened in the last 4.5 billion years. Systems that are stable over that length of time have to have pretty powerful restoring forces that keep them in equilibrium. Also, the CO2 necessary to convert the Earth to Venus is locked up in sedimentary rock, it could not re-emerge on timescales less than millions of years.
And over the last 4.5 billion years there have been times with substantially higher temperature and CO2 concentration than projected for the next century.
Yes, I thought about adding that but forgot. Thanks for bringing that up.
This is what I think too.
Then again, outside the argument, I have to add: "What's the probability that our understanding of past temperatures and CO₂ concentrations is horribly wrong? What's the probability that my personal understanding of how these figures should be interpreted (e.g. how certain we are about them), and what they mean about the present (e.g. what differences there are between those eras and the present) is horribly wrong?"
I've just been looking at the discussion of past temperatures in the new IPCC report. Their estimate for the PETM, about 55 million years ago, is that average temperature was 10°C-25°C warmer than 1850-1900, which is their usual baseline. Even the low estimate is well above anything the IPCC projects for the next century, I think the next two centuries but haven't checked.
I'm not sure that 10-25° figure is right. I saw a lower figure at one point in the main report, so there may be some confusion or a typo or something.
I would also be careful about the rhetoric used here. A lot of people interpret 50% to mean: we don't really know. Also, a lot of people interpret 1% to mean - small chance, but still, there's a chance. It is usually much better to interpret risk, especially of unlikely things, on a logarithmic scale. And the chance that we suffer Venus's fate any time soon is not easily quantified, but is likely orders of magnitude less than 1%. My best guess (I'm informed about this stuff to some degree, but not an expert) would be in the range of 0.01% to 0.0000001%.
As a quick example, here's a kind-of-recent article from James Kasting furthering his work that suggests that even if we hit Venus level concentrations of C02 (highly unlikely), we still wouldn't get a runaway effect.
https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.1089/ast.2014.1153
Certainly it is contentious and we can't perfectly model the future (including how much stored methane might be released from permafrost), but (likely) overstating the risk lends itself a bit too well to the catastrophizing mindset that already plagues the climate discussion (and causes many people to not have kids, or to tune things out entirely, or to adopt a distrust of the topic specifically and science generally).
Where are we going to get 90 bar of CO2? If you burned down *all* terrestrial vegetation and *all* known or imagined fossil fuel deposits, you'd boost atmosphere CO2 by a factor of ~5, i.e. from 400ppm to 0.2%. That leaves 89.8 bar to go. Even if you somehow pulled all of the CO2 from the oceans (which is impossible, as it is in equilibrium with the atmosphere) you would only get up to about 2% CO2. The only way you can get to Venus levels of CO2 is to pull out the CO2 from the petatonnes of carbonate sedimentary rock, which is where almost all of the Earth's primordial CO2 is stashed.
> Even if you somehow pulled all of the CO2 from the oceans
lets say that using magic we evaporate oceans - that should both pull CO2 from there and provide water vapor which is also greenhouse gas.
Yes, that is not viable using current tech, but if we want to reach Venus-like state then you cannot be limited in such way.
Or maybe we imported C02 from Venus? Would it be even enough?
Ah...well, were we to evaporate all the oceans that all by itself would inject a phenomenal amount of heat into the atmosphere, the heat capacity of water being what it is. Since it all has to leave by radiation, no convection of course, I imagine the Earth would remain at an average temperature of 100C for a very long time, maybe thousands of years. So who needs a greenhouse effect?
I think there's enough CO2 on Venus to do the job, but the transport might be tricky. It would need to keep up with natural processes (e.g. photosynthesis, carbonate rock formation in the deep ocean) that remove the CO2. I think on the whole the best approach would be to set up enormous solar-powered limekilns and just, say, roast the entire Dolomites and dump the lime into the sea. Still a challenging transport job, but at least it's hundreds instead of hundreds of millions of km, and not through vacuum.
The P-T event sounds really nasty but it stopped before reaching venusian levels. And Dimetrodon didn't know how to do geoengineering.
I am not certain, but 1% of chance seems extremely, extremely, extremely high.
From my understanding even doing things like "burn all fossil fuels, release clathrates, release all CO2 locked in permafrost" AND "Yellowstone erupts" AND "Chicxulub-sized impact" together would be not enough to trigger it.
(not an expert, let me know if there is some serious argument that it may happen - but for example IPCC is basically going "lol, no" on that)
Yes, we may be missing something but as far as I am aware this scenario is not treated as something serious.
It is in class of "unexpected supersized long-term comet strikes Earth directly", "LHC generates black hole that eats Earth", "works by H. P. Lovecraft were a documentary", "aliens invade", "detonation of the first nuclear bomb ignites atmosphere" - not outright impossible, but describing that as "1% chance" would be really panicking and overstating problem.
Yes, there is chance that we will be directly hit by Shoemaker–Levy 9 comet, but sure as hell it is far lower than 1%.
-------------------------------------------------------
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_Shoemaker%E2%80%93Levy_9
> Over the next six days, 21 distinct impacts were observed, with the largest coming on July 18 at 07:33 UTC when fragment G struck Jupiter. This impact created a giant dark spot over 12,000 km (7,500 mi) across, and was estimated to have released an energy equivalent to 6,000,000 megatons of TNT (600 times the world's nuclear arsenal)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_Shoemaker%E2%80%93Levy_9#/media/File:Impact_site_of_fragment_G.png
Note that impact scar is far larger than Earth (in diameter) and of similar area (450 Mkm^2 vs 510 Mkm^2).
-------------------------------------------------------
I would give 1% for
> global warming causes collapse of entire civilization below medieval or ancient levels, back to the stone age, over 99% population dead - within lifetime of children born in 2021
and even that would be mostly things like nuclear war triggered by political tensions caused by global warming.
> Chicxulub-sized impact
Even if we assume that it would again strike and evaporate limestone rocks for maximum negative impact.
I think Scott is using 1% more in the "outside the argument" sense, whereas from your comments above you arrive at your <<<1% figure "inside the argument": https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GrtbTAPfkJa4D6jjH/confidence-levels-inside-and-outside-an-argument
Yes, and it even works in this specific case as an argument.
But "1% chance of turning Earth in Venus, with greenhouse effect strong enough to melt lead and zinc on surface" is horrifying. And enough to panic.
Actual risk of that is far far lower.
And people here are quite likely to take action based on "1% of something horrifying" so I wanted to note that it is not 1% of Venus, that is not going to happen[0].
[0] Due to action of humans with current tech or currently predictable tech - multigenerational spaceships and colonization of entire Milky Way galaxy is more likely than this.
note https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/please-dont-give-up-on-having-kids/comment/3212224
> extremely focused omnicidal dictatorship ruled the Earth for about a thousand years, devoting its full wealth and capability
that depending on your view may count as within predictable tech - multigenerational spaceships and easier than colonization of galaxy
Venus is right out, at least as an "oops we burned too much fossil fuels" accident. Venus is what it is because it underwent a runaway greenhouse effect before its wimpy excuse for early oceans and plate tectonics could lock up all its carbon in the form of carbonate rocks. The carbon you'd need to turn Earth into Venus, can't be obtained by burning fossil fuels (or liberating methane clathrates or whatever) because almost all of it was turned into boring non-burnable rock before it had a chance to turn into coal.
I went through this with Ph.D. climatologist William Hyde back in the rec.arts.sf.* newsgroups of legendary usenet in the before times, and we had lots of fun figuring out what it *would* take to turn Earth into Venus. I wish I could find that old post, but google's usenet search kind of sucks. It was a glorious little SFnal scenario, in which an extremely focused omnicidal dictatorship ruled the Earth for about a thousand years, devoting its full wealth and capability to mining carbonate rocks and stacking it in Everest-sized piles, while building ginormous nuclear furnaces. The very last generation of humanity retreated into refrigerated subterranean bunkers to keep the furnaces running and operate the bulldozers that would endlessly push stockpiled rock into their maws, where nuclear fire (nothing else will plausibly do) liberates the eons-old carbon. Well, endlessly until the refrigerators fail.
*That* gets you to the point where the oceans evaporate, and the rest of the process can proceed on its own unto Venus. Just burning fossil fuels, even with the worst plausible feedbacks, might get you late Paleocene Earth.
Matt Yglesias touches on this in One Billion Americans (the rest of which was also great). He argues that climate change can only be solved by technological progress. Even if America cut its population by 50%, there are billions of people in south Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa whose lives are rapidly improving, and therefore will see their emissions per capita increase. It's unethical to try and thwart this improvement in their lives, and so the only way to fix climate change is through technological innovation. And the best way to achieve innovation is with *more people* not less. Yglesias therefore encourages policies to make it easier for Americans to have children, but to increase immigration to the largest technologically innovative economy.
Eli Dourado has also been writing extensively in this same space. I wish the technological innovation view point would become mainstream. We have solutions to many of the technological problems, but we don't have them to the regulatory ones. Its quite distressing.
You probably can't fix climate change just manage it...
> Then they divided all these generations of future carbon production by the number of years you personally would live, and said it would produce 60 tons of carbon per year.
This actually makes me really angry.
Working around GHG calculations and offsetting, it is really important to understand that emissions at different times are not perfectly inter-temporally substitutable. No matter your methodology for carbon valuation, you will price emissions at different times at different costs/values, to reflect changes in the climate, society, and technology. The emissions associated with my great-great-great-grandchild are *meaningless* in the framework we need to operate in. KN [scientist] acknowledges this - so why publish something so skewed?
"if black, enslaved"
Are Americans incapable of thinking about slavery without thinking specifically about American slavery? Even Scott? The brainwashing goes deep.
Entire paragraph seems to be about situation in USA specifically.
500 years ago the USA didn't even exist.
And I think serfs would have been more common than chattel farmworkers back then.
Right, it does not work. I forgot that USA appeared relatively recently.
Even "If gay, they could be burned alive"?
Good points, but I have to question the methodology on per capita emissions by state/DC. It seems likely that these numbers are based only on generation specifically within the boundary which would creating a misleading impression of standard of living attainable relative to emissions. For example Wyoming imports 14x more energy than it consumes, whereas DC imports almost all of its energy (EIA.gov). 2/3 of DC's electricity mix is fossil fuel https://www.pjm.com/~/media/library/reports-notices/special-reports/20170330-pjms-evolving-resource-mix-and-system-reliability.ashx DC is uses more electricity per capita than 89% of the country, but since it's all imported that seems to not be counted.
This holds true for all the high use states, they export coal or gas, or refine crude oil, to be used in other areas of the country. NY's numbers don't include the carbon from the millions of yards they use annually, steel from Pennsylvania, or the incineration or burial of their rubbish at out-of-state facilities.
I've also always questioned how flights play into this, even though the share of emissions is relatively small. Rural residents do drive much more, but rarely fly. Half the US never flies. Based on my anecdotal experiences in NYC and DC it seems likely that they account for an outsize share of these emissions as well, although I can't find data on this beyond broad emissions stats - https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/10/17/climate/flying-shame-emissions.html
I think that’s a good criticism of these specific numbers. But when you account the costs of flying and such, there’s a question whether the carbon cost of a business traveler should be accounted to the traveler, or to the customers of the company on whose behalf they are traveling. And how to do that accounting for trips that mix work and pleasure.
Thank you, that makes more sense.
Shoddy proofreading on my part. Wyoming *exports energy. NYC numbers don't include yards of *concrete, etc. And the various syntax errors. Was rushed
"I am grateful for my parents’ decisions here and so I conclude that having children in a world with a 1% risk of apocalypse is fine."
I have seen this argument in some other places, but I have never really understood it.
For me, a life has a moral value only if it already exists; that's why I think abortion at the early stages of a pregnancy is clearly more defendable than killing a newborn baby, and contraception is even more harmless.
(Obviously that view brings up the difficult question of when an organism stops being a bunch of cells and starts being a subject, but that question, Aaronson's "pretty hard problem" seems unavoidable anyway)
And on a more subjective note, although I am fortunate enough to have a pretty comfortable, sometimes pleasant life, I can't wrap my head around what it would mean for me to be thankful to my parents for my existence, because I wouldn't miss it I wasn't there.
For me, this gratefulness is as alien as the (much more rarely expressed) resentment for all the hardships that one's parents inflicted them by bringing them to the world. Perhaps even more.
As someone who is quite convinced by anti-natalist arguments, I understand that my moral views are not typical. (By the way, I agree with most of the arguments presented in the post, though I disagree with some conclusions)
But if someone can help me understand the [pro-choice][anti-murder][not anti-natalist] position, it's probably here.
> I have seen this argument in some other places, but I have never really understood it.
> For me, a life has a moral value only if it already exists
What about following
- It is not immoral to not procreate
- Bringing children into world, children who will live a good lives is a good thing
> I can't wrap my head around what it would mean for me to be thankful to my parents for my existence, because I wouldn't miss it I wasn't there.
What about comparing it to being happy about eating a tasty cake received as a surprise gift? Despite that you wouldn't miss if you would not receive it?
There is plenty of things that I like, that I wouldn't miss if they would never exist. I like oak tree outside my window, I do not mis Xeghaha tree outside my window that never existed.
Right
For the first question, I guess part of the problem is determining what we mean by "children with good lives"
But more importantly, I don't really understand how it can be both not immoral to not do something, and a moral good to do it (I think the term is supererogatory)
Maybe that has to do with how how convincing you think Singer is with his arguments about the duty to help the people you can help.
I should maybe add that, to the extent that it's possible to live up to this idea, I don't, but I'm talking about theoretical questions.
As for the second question, I agree that one can appreciate something that one wouldn't have missed, and I admit my argument was at least poorly worded.
I did mean to bring up the idea of counterfactuals: even if you wouldn't miss the tasty cake if you didn't know about it, the fact that you appreciate its existence seems to be linked to the other worlds that your mind considers, in which it doesn't exist.
And (at least on an emotional, heuristic level) you find that the worlds in which you have cake are more pleasant than the worlds in which you don't.
But how can you compare the experiences that you have with the absence of any experience?
I guess if there was a clear, universal "mean" of happiness, I could compare my global happiness to it, but I don't think this idea makes much sense, because some people are happy to continue living in terrible conditions I would definitely not want to be born in. There's also the question of psychological predispositions to happiness, which themselves interact with the environment, and that makes the question even muddier.
I’m not sure I understand the first part of this comment. For example you see somebody lifting a suitcase into the overhead compartment which is a moderate struggle but clearly within their capability. You do not know the individual. I would argue that the choice to offer your assistance falls under the heading of a moral good that would not be immoral to withhold. There are a lot of things that are “nice but not necessary.“
Am I misunderstanding?
No you're right, there is some nuance to this stuff that I probably could have worked out better.
I agree that in daily life, we can think of some things as supererogatory.
But what we mean is that their utility is close to zero, or that it depends strongly on very subtle differences in the situation that we are not considering in the conversation.
In the example of the luggage, the differences might be how tired you are, how old/tired the traveler seems to be, etc
So it's about levels of analysis
Of course the subtle differences are also present in the "having kids" discussion.
But I feel like, if I were convinced that having kids is a good in itself, just like helping someone with their briefcase is good, I would think of having kids, not as supererogatory, but just good. And I would see the people choosing to not have kids as either wrong or unable to accomplish good things by circumstance.
So, respectively, like someone who would refuse to admit that helping the traveler is a good thing, or someone who can't help them because they're disabled, or in another car, or whatever.
In other words, I don't think I would use the level of analysis at which it makes sense to think of actions as supererogatory.
I did my best, not sure this is very clear
I think the pro-choice, anti-murder, pro-natal or natal-neutral position works like this:
People on average live good lives, with net positive utility, but it is possible to live a bad life, with net negative utility (either because they are miserable or because they are hurting others). If someone is living a bad life, it is still wrong to murder them because a) you may not have judged their present and future quality of life and the effects of their death on others correctly and b) if people could just murder each other whenever they wanted to society would fall apart and we'd all be living bad lives. This means that in certain restricted, codified, high-knowledge situations it is OK or even good to kill somebody--all of them are controversial, but almost everyone accepts one kind or another. We move from pure to rule utilitarianism. Even if a murder appears to have positive utility, if we couldn't prove that to society in a way that it could categorize as acceptable, the murder is wrong.
But what about unborn or unconceived people? The first thing to say is that both groups are in the same situation: they aren't yet sentient members of society, so they have no rights. The social argument against murder doesn't work in their favor. But we still have to consider their future happiness, in the same way that we have to consider our own future happiness. And since they're in the same situation as each other, we shouldn't just be thinking about the ethics of abortion: if abortion is inherently immoral, then so is any way of decreasing the number of one's children, including abstinence from sex while fertile.
But if everyone tried to maximize their number of children, they would not be living mostly good lives anymore: the world would become overcrowded and poor, women always would be pregnant, most human activities would suffer at the expense of child-rearing. Even if the average life remained worth living, the total population would rise only a small amount before being limited by resource competition, that is, many people would either starve or die in war. The increase in population would not be great enough to justify the large decrease in quality of life. This means that in rule-utilitarian terms, abstinence is acceptable, and therefore abortion and contraception are too. But are they, in fact, mandatory? No, because a world without children would be worse than ours: if each generation is mostly happy under the current system, then having (let's hope) tens of thousands more generations would be better than having zero more. Therefore, the decision to bear children should be decided not by a general rule, but a on a case-by-case basis or by several more specific rules.
What reason could justify not having a child in this system, though? Well, for one thing, if our lives are net-positive it's not by very much: it's quite possible that having a child would be worse for you than it would be good for the child (especially since you would probably then be a worse parent). It's also possible that you have reason to think your child in particular would not be happy, or that your time and effort could go to better use elsewhere. Or if you would be a better parent when you are older, you would have good reason to wait.
I'm not perfectly convinced of either utilitarianism or several of the premises of this argument, but I do find it fairly strong and I hope it gives some kind of insight into what people with that set of opinions might be thinking. Though of course most people just haven't thought about it much.
.
As for feeling grateful to your parents, I think that as a piece of rhetoric it is mostly just used to illustrate the idea that most lives are good, or at least that you expect your hypothetical child to be happy because you are. It doesn't work as an argument on its own. But I do think it makes sense as an emotion. If you can be grateful for them raising you, why not also for taking the necessary steps to do so?
But if I understand you correctly, the nub of the issue is that some people, like me, see nonexistence as equivalent (in moral or hedonistic terms--not in all ways) to a state of neutrality, without pleasure and joy or pain and sadness, while to you and many others nonexistence seems incommensurate with any state of experience--it's not on the scale. I'm not sure how to make an argument for my position. It just seems obvious to me. But I'll try. Apologies if this seems like a painfully basic argument that misses the point: Axiomatically, existence doesn't have value in itself, either positive or negative. Therefore, nonexistence can't have value either, since it should have the negative value of existence. Axiomatically, happiness has positive value and misery has negative value. Since in ethics we are asking "How much value does this have?", "nonexistence" is always interchangeable with "existence without happiness or misery" in ethical contexts.
Thank you for arguing in such detail, you make some good points
I don't agree with everything but I can't always explain in which way.
About the last point, I'm not sure I feel grateful for my parents raising me, as a whole
I do feel grateful for specific good parts and resentful for specific bad parts, but I don't think I have any feelings about the whole thing because I tend to see it as deterministic
It's kind of the same with conception I guess
I do make a difference between pro-natal and natal-neutral positions, and I'm much more sympathetic to the latter
I also understand wanting to place non-existence on the "good life / bad life" scale. As I said, I'm not sure how to quantify these things, but I don't really think it matters, as long as if you place it on the scale, you place it in a neutral or unfavorable position
My argument for the unfavorable position relative to the neutral position would be linked to preference utilitarianism I think:
The most important thing about bringing an important, neutral-expectation experience to someone is consent
You can't get consent from your kids before they're born
Therefore, in doubt you should abstain
Or something like this
Suppose some maniac was about to launch a nuke toward your parents' city and someone heroically prevented it. Would you feel thankful to that person?
We're talking before my birth right?
I would be thankful I think
In a mostly cognitive way, because it would have happened a long time ago and I wouldn't feel directly impacted (although in a causal, physical sense, I would be)
But I don't think I would be more thankful than if another city of equal value to my eyes had been saved from horrible pain (also counting the pain of all the people who lost living loved ones)
Thank you for writing this.
Having a kid is one of the most radical, beautiful, and profound acts of hope that anyone can possibly do, and I encourage anyone reading this who wants to have kids to do it.
I half-remember Scott mentioning somewhere (in the subreddit?) that he wants to have a kid, so there.
I definitely agree with the general thrust of your argument, that the damage caused by climate change is not going to be so terrible that you shouldn't have children, but I would quibble the point about climate change being unlikely to affect peoples lives in the west.
Climate migration, and food and water insecurity, both have potential as destabilising political forces. Add into this the political dysfunction in the US, and you could get into a situation where these problems, which are solvable to be sure, don't get dealt with in an effective way. I think that could lead to many kinds of disruption in peoples day to day lives, and I don't think that that's a scenario that is totally unrealistic.
I agree
The mere meteorological consequences seem like they would be hard to deal with, especially in a situation of energy scarcity.
We spend a lot more energy on heating than on cooling, in most temperate areas. So at least the biggest meteorological consequence shouldn't be hard to deal with, and it should make things easier from an energy standpoint.
True
But we are so dependent on fossil fuels, it's hard to imagine we're not going to run into energy availability problems if we stop using them
Which we will, either because we want to avoid even more climate change and air pollution, or because we run out
(by run out I don't mean that every well is empty, just that fossil fuels become more and more expensive and hard to come by)
I don’t think he’s saying that it’s unlikely to affect our lives in the west. But I think his point is that most of us would be happier to live our current lives with an extra (hurricane/tornado/wildfire) making us evacuate for one week every year rather than living a 1960s lifestyle, and our children and children’s children will likely be happier with their future economic situation combined with environmental disasters than we are with our current economic situation. They will be negatively effected by climate change, but not so much that their lives will be worse than ours, let alone not worth living.
"But tens of thousands of deaths and trillions of dollars lost is completely compatible with the average person in the First World not really noticing much of a change to their daily lives. The next 75 years of global warming are going to be worse than we’ve gotten already, maybe millions of lives lost and tens of trillions of dollars in damage. In aggregate, they’re going to be a giant disaster. But the average person in the First World, probably including your child, still won’t notice much of a change to their daily lives."
This is the point that I'm disagreeing with. I think there are a large number of climate related/exacerbated scenarios, which would lead to a noticeable change to the daily lives of many people in the west.
Climate change already affects my life even in one of the less-affected parts of the country. Weather patterns have changed enough to impact crops and make summer both frequently miserable and incredibly long.
As a daily, surfer, it may have made the water a bit more comfortable (though this year has been chilly), and if we ever do get more storms, it will probably generate some great waves. I guess it is all relative.
Wait until the tropical diseases begin to migrate to your area...
Not having children because of climate change hysteria just means the Earth gets inherited by people less susceptible to such maladaptive mind viruses, i.e. it is self-defeating at the most fundamental level.
Furthermore, what makes this extra ironic is that it is actually quite likely that global warming will *increases* the world's carrying capacity, not diminish it. In paleoclimatology, times of dearth, desertification, civilizational collapse, etc. were accompanied by cold spells, which create droughts. Conversely, a warmer planet is a wetter planet and a more fertile one as well, thanks to a more intensive fertilization effect. The Sahara was an edenic garden populated by rhinos and elephants when the world was 1-2C warmer. The opening up of Canada and Siberia to intensive agriculture, as well as more surprising areas like African highlands, will overwhelmingly make up for any marginal losses elsewhere.
As Scott Alexander alludes here, the impact of sea level rise is massively overstated. I will also add one more thing that might be a surprise to some: Most of the world's big coastal cities are *sinking* at a much faster rate due to the weight of all their buildings than due to sea level rise. And besides, no, 1% of SF and 10% of Manhattan will not disappear even if sea levels rise by three meters. Reminder that a third of the Netherlands is below sea level, with the deepest point being around 6 meters. They accomplished most of this during the pre-industrial era. You really believe a modern civilization (let alone a futuristic one) will have *any* problems whatsoever protecting its largest concentrations of GDP from water?
In reality, we should not be "fighting" global warming, but happily going along with it and perhaps even accelerating it.
Some examples of this from "Deep Future" by Curt Stager (professional climatologist, i.e. not a kook):
"Much of lowland Tokyo sank 6 to 13 feet (2 to 4 m) during the last century as a result of groundwater extraction; subsidence rates near the harbor can exceed 4 inches (10 cm) per year. Similar processes drive the soft ground beneath Bangkok, Thailand, downward as fast as 4.5 inches (12 cm) per year; that’s over twice the speed of Hansen’s extreme inundation estimate and forty times the recent rate of sea-level rise. And every year China’s largest city, Shanghai, sinks a third of an inch (10 mm) deeper into the Yangtze Delta. During the last century it dropped nearly 9 feet (3 m) and suffered billions of dollars in structural and flood damage.
These examples help to show what the future advance of the sea will really be like in most cases; slow, unrelenting, costly, exasperating, but rarely deadly to humans. It won’t be a frothing shoreward rush of waves, but it will still be well worth slowing down as much as possible, as residents of Shanghai and the other already-sinking cities would surely agree."
Stretched out as it is over many centuries, I consider this to be close to a non-issue.
Another big example is Jakarta, which is supposedly sinking at 10cm a year in some places due to groundwater extraction.
Some parts of the world are actually rising. Scandinavia for example, up to 0,8 cm per year in some places. Due to the hundreds of meters of ice that pressed down the land during the last glacial maximum, as late as 20.000 years ago.
I don't think it is mainly the effect of the weight of the buildings. Some of it is geological, New Orleans is below sea level, I believe, because draining it to reduce yellow fever resulted in compression of the soil. Also, the Army Corps of Engineers has devoted a great deal of effort to keeping the Mississippi from changing its mouth as the delta builds out, so it is now dumping the soil it carries over the edge of the continental shelf, not letting it wash back to balance subsidence from the weight of past deposition (my memory of my geologist wife's account, but she is traveling at the moment so I can't check details with her — we lived in New Orleans for a while).
I was irritated years ago at an alarmist publication with a cover picture of flooding in a coastal area of the south, with no explanation that subsidence there was about twice as large as sea level rise.
The running joke in here New Orleans involves the 50% leak rate for the Sewer and Water Board. Without those leaking pipes, subsidence would be worse. Joking aside though, along with the sinking and subsidence of NOLA and LA gulf coast, coastal erosion & the channelization of the Mississippi are big contributors.
In addition areas with heavy mining and water extraction drop as much as 20cm - 50cm each year (though rarely on edge of sea).
There are places in heavily mined places that have small rivers that need to be pumped up (sorry for YT link - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LseK5gp66u8 )
> Not having children because of climate change hysteria just means the Earth gets inherited by people less susceptible to such maladaptive mind viruses, i.e. it is self-defeating at the most fundamental level.
Even if you're going to be mercenary about this, my guess is that these are people whose genes you generally want in the next generation.
> Furthermore, what makes this extra ironic is that it is actually quite likely that global warming will *increases* the world's carrying capacity, not diminish it. In paleoclimatology, times of dearth, desertification, civilizational collapse, etc. were accompanied by cold spells, which create droughts. Conversely, a warmer planet is a wetter planet and a more fertile one as well, thanks to a more intensive fertilization effect. The Sahara was an edenic garden populated by rhinos and elephants when the world was 1-2C warmer. The opening up of Canada and Siberia to intensive agriculture, as well as more surprising areas like African highlands, will overwhelmingly make up for any marginal losses elsewhere.
I think it's plausible that millions of people will die because some megacity in Africa can no longer get water effectively. In the abstract, the earth's carrying capacity could very well go up, but unless you want to transport the city of Lagos to Quebec (I don't know whether the logistical or political problems would be harder!) we can't actually make use of that increased capacity to prevent millions of people from dying.
They're higher IQ and probably more conscientious and trusting of authority than average, so yes, that's probably true. I didn't say this would necessarily be good for society.
Oceanic transport is really, really cheap. Lagos is a coastal megapolis, and the Chinese are helpfully crisscrossing Africa with railways and expanding ports. I'm highly skeptical about "millions of people" dying. When *did* millions of people die of climatic causes in Africa? One prominent example would be the Ethiopian famine of the 1980s. Which in turn was thought to have been caused by "global dimming" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_dimming , i.e. a diminution of solar intensity and heating at the tropics, which reduced the strength of the monsoon that fed Ethiopians. Yet another demonstration of the pattern that it's generally cooling that kills, not warming.
Right, the Ethiopian famine. Why didn't all those starving Ethiopians go to a country that had food?
I wandered into a lecture as an undergrad about "sustainable food supply" and was interested to discover that the biggest issue for many nations in getting food to their citizens is less in the production of enough food to feed everyone, and more in the political structures that prevent appropriate distribution of food that has already been produced. Indeed, even charities that try to give food to people often run into the problem of corrupt local government seizing food that would otherwise be sufficient to end a famine. Why keep people from starving when you can take the food, export it for cash, and keep the crisis going?
This actually works for more than just food. Iron supplementation can save lots of lives in Africa, yet getting those simple, cheap iron supplements to the people who need them is often frustrated by corrupt local government. This doesn't even run into refrigeration issues for things like vaccines. It's a cheap, plentiful solution that's widely available (and provided for free by charitable organizations), and yet hundreds of thousands still die of it.
I don't think we are getting a functional global government on the radar, absent shit getting *really* bad
At a slight tangent, people talk as if water shortage means people dying of thirst. When I calculated the figure for the U.S. quite a long time ago, per capita water consumption was about a thousand gallons a day. That isn't drinking water, it's agricultural and industrial uses. You made the point long ago on SSC that all urban water consumption in California was less than what went to grow alfalfa.
A few years ago I saw data showing that only about 10% of CA water usage was residential, and about half of that was landscaping. The exhortations to use less household water (take shorter showers, etc.) are usually ridiculous in light of the scale of agricultural and industrial waste.
The water economist David Zetland has for decades been promoting proper water pricing as the solution to the vast majority of water shortages. Most water systems are run by governments, which have an incentive to under-price water to all customers. How often are politicians re-elected on platforms based on, "I'll charge more for water!"? Because of the incentives facing governments, this obvious public choice problem exists around the world, resulting in under-priced water leading to over use and aquifer depletion.
Of course, many misguided advocates for the poor also advocate for low water prices, which often tend to benefit the wealthy rather than the poor,
"I conclude this section by reminding readers that low water prices, by encouraging use, often harm the poor who are least able to cope with the resulting scarcity and shortage. In New Delhi, for example, around 40 percent of water is lost to leaks and theft and revenue covers only 40 percent of costs.12 The resulting lack of funds to run or expand the system (and water to flow though it) means the poor are more likely to get their water from tankers than the rich who are connected to the semi-functional, cheaper network (Vinayak and Sewak, 2016). Fuente et al. (2016), likewise, describe show subsidies in Nairobi are more likely to go to the rich than the poor. "
Zetland's solution is basically to price water appropriately and then provide rebates to the poor.
For an overview of the global pathologies of water pricing and how water should be priced, see Zetland's "The Role of Prices in Managing Water Scarcity," from which the paragraph above was taken, see
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/347906672_The_role_of_prices_in_managing_water_scarcity
Of course all of this is obvious to most economists, and yet mainstream debate on water, at least in mass media, seems oblivious to common sense economics on this issue (as on most issues). What percentage of media coverage of current or future water shortages even mentions pricing as a solution? I'd say well under 1%.
Yes, but I do think we also need water for irrigation if we are to not have water shortage causing crop failure. And besides, the US has already been irrigating unsustainably -- draining 10,000 year aquifers -- for over a century...
https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2021/08/16/why-pumping-groundwater-isnt-a-long-term-solution-to-drought
We need to irrigate in some places, but not everywhere. In California, agriculture produces <2% of the GDP, and employs a few % of the population. It could stop doing agriculture altogether, and import all its food from wetter places.
On the other hand, one effect of CO2 fertilization is to reduce water requirements for plants. They can get the carbon they need while passing less air through the leaves, thus lose less water.
How much less water per doubling of CO2 concentration are we talking? 0.1%? 1%? 10%? 50%?
A priori a factor of 2, right? You need half the air to get the same amount of CO2, so half the water otherwise lost gets lost. But I thought a major purpose of transpiration at least in taller plants was to provide the motive force to haul water up from the soil, since (contra elementary school science class) capillary action is wholly inadequate. So I can't really see a redwood needing significantly less water. But maybe for grasses and crops?
I don't have data, but C3 plants (all important crops except maize and sugarcane) increase yield by about 30% with a doubling of CO2. If we assume the amount of CO2 they need is proportional to yield, which seems a plausible guess, they should need 1.3/2 =.65 as much water.
I want to push back on this framing of the movement of a megacity in Lagos to Quebec. I see this a lot in climate debates, and I don't think people who use it understand how much it biases the skeptics against their arguments. Because that's not how this kind of thing works in real life.
A megacity in Lagos doesn't run out of water overnight and have to suddenly move to Quebec. Experts project these things to happen over 1-2 centuries. In that time, many generations come and go. Nobody has to actually relocate their family to depopulate Lagos. The next generation can see 50% of the children relocate to other cities and establish themselves there. They'll still come back to visit, but there's just more opportunity elsewhere. A city that shrinks in population by 50% every 25 years will have <1% its original population 200 years later. And nobody had to approve a government mega-project to do it.
This is literally happening to dying towns in Pennsylvania and other parts of what used to be called "steel country" in the US. When steel went to Japan in the 1970's and 1980's lots of small towns that produced coal to feed the steel mills in Pittsburgh, Allentown, and the like no longer had jobs available for the next generation. People still live in many of those small towns, but the populations are getting older as many from the upcoming generation find opportunity elsewhere. I've seen this firsthand.
That's not to discount major shifts in global population. But if you want to support an argument like the Laotian megacity disastrophe, you have to do it based on threshold effects. Not based on slow-clock, gradual resource depletion.
Scott,
I strongly disagree. The increased carrying capacity, and higher average global income (estimated by the IPCC to be between 500 and 600% higher than today by centuries end), and improved technology (transportation, desalination, market networks, etc) will make it easier to transport water to this mythical city. Modern people don’t move to water, they bring water to them wherever they go.
I think the likelihood of millions dying from thirst due to climate change is extremely remote. I would suggest that overreactions to climate change could disrupt societies and markets enough to kill millions, though.
My framing of the issue is that society is complex and fragile. Climate change is a negative externality or wake generated by economic growth. Billions of people are counting on that economic growth to improve the lives of themselves and their children. It is very desirable that we continue economic and technological advancement while also minimizing this and other negative externalities. However, in no case should we kill the goose laying the golden eggs. And it is possible to kill this goose by taking misguided actions to reduce CO2. Derailing the economic growth of Africa COULD kill millions.
Because relying on imported water has worked out so well in the past?
This is like a longer version of 'The climate has always changed' argument for doing little to nothing about the broader negative impacts on the environment caused by rapid, unchecked industrialization.
It's been theorized that the beginning of intensive rice cultivation in East Asia pushed back the onset of the next Ice Age. If so, that worked out splendidly. Otherwise, we wouldn't be discussing this, but exchanging stories about the mythical Summertime over a campfire.
The climate "skeptics" are no less susceptible to "maladaptive mind viruses". Like for example the one that says climate change isn't a thing to be skeptical about, but a certain hoax.
If we're going to have maladaptive mind viruses, we can at least not have them be a monoculture.
Could you identify where I expressed climate skepticism? Let alone claimed it was a hoax?
I happen to have a blog post from 2009 debunking AGW myths. http://akarlin.com/2009/06/global-warming-denial-myths/ The reality of AGW was always obvious to me. Conversely, the stance that AGW's effects *have to be* predominantly negative *are* a religion, much like climate change denial come to think of it (people are incredibly hostile to the notion that AGW might be neutral or even good, as demonstrated even by the otherwise rationalist Scott in his response to me with the bizarre scenario of Lagos running out of water).
Happily I snapped out of that apocalypse cult several years ago. A non cherry-picked reading of the paleoclimate literature demonstrates that the effects will be mixed at worst, and on the very low probability this is wrong, geoengineering is trivially cheap relative to carbon taxes and other Green projects (which hit the poor hardest).
I'll be very cynical and propose a Darwin award for every person who advises this AND does by his advice.
I remember a book review on Slate Star Codex about existential risk. which estimated how likely various threats were.
Does anyone remember how big of an existential risk climate change posed relative to other problems that might occur by 2100?
Update: I found it. The Precipice by Toby Ord.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/04/01/book-review-the-precipice/
There's a table of risks towards the end.
So, one in one thousand?
And of course, Lomborg and the Copenhagen consensus also ranked global priorities and climate change didn’t score very high at least in terms of cost and benefit. IOW, not only is there virtually no existential risk, but in terms of cost effectiveness, global warming shouldn’t even be that high on our list of pressing issues. Perhaps there are better reasons to not have kids?
https://www.ted.com/talks/bjorn_lomborg_global_priorities_bigger_than_climate_change/transcript
As a kid I remember reading A Choice of Catastrophes by Asimov, which ran through all the possible ways that the world could end, starting with catastrophes that would destroy the entire universe (Big Crunch, heat death), continuing on to catastrophes that could destroy the solar system, then catastrophes that would just destroy the Earth, and finally catastrophes that would leave the Earth in place but just make it uninhabitable. It's from 1979 so it's no longer quite up to date (the Big Crunch is looking very unlikely these days), but a good read nonetheless.
I had 2 kids already for reasons having nothing to do with this argument. So I am biased.
Unfortunately my gut feeling is, if you pit this argument against Moloch, Moloch wins. Politicians have done nothing to keep us from getting to this point wrt global warming. I think the ones who are electable have gotten that way because they're mostly corrupt as hell. Whatever their party, if they even accept global warming their "solutions" will inevitably enrich their political allies and not actually solve any problems. If only one party believes global warming is a threat, this actually makes things worse, since that party will continue to be elected if people believe the problem is getting worse, but then not actually fix the problem.
Fixing global warming would also require global cooperation, and my understanding at present is most of the world doesn't really care since they're more focused on improving standards of living.
Sloppy arguments, possibly, but these are my hunches as to why global warming will play out in full no matter what we do. I make myself feel better by reading Paul Wheaton's stuff and fantasizing about getting into permaculture on a larger scale one day.
I agree. My son is a beautiful, kind, generous boy and I love him dearly. I hope I am wrong about the world he will inherit because I believe the foundations of our civilization are much more fragile than Scott does.
I say the system is working as intended, Democrat voters are getting the climate response they want: some research funded, but not 6$ a gallon gas.
Great point. Moloch has allied with whichever demon represents willful ignorance...
Climate alarmism is based on a morality tale where the ignorant masses are accepting a Faustian bargain with the devil that only the alarmist and their friends are smart enough to understand. When you look at the actual costs of climate change and see these maps where you really have to squint to see any difference, hurricanes going from six per year to seven per year, and supposed civil wars in the middle east you're pretty sure are caused by political and religious ideology, you start to really doubt whether #costs of climate change > #costs of action to prevent climate change. You have a hard time understanding how anyone could be close to certain the costs of the former exceed the costs of the latter and think it's more likely that they are being driven by an emotionally compelling story that lets them feel superior to and control the behavior of others.
On a brighter note, perhaps we don’t need global coordinated political cooperation. For example, if some bright scientists can figure out how to remove CO2 at an affordable cost, or we can crack the code on fusion, or make a breakthrough in solar or geothermal. Any one of these or various other ideas (which myriads of bright people are working on as we speak) would not just solve the negative externality of climate change, but also further improve standards of living.
Apropos: https://arxiv.org/abs/1505.03118 ("When causation does not imply correlation:
robust violations of the Faithfulness axiom")
The relevance being that population levels are subject to control systems, and so any policy argument premised on an individual action's impact must account for a strong form of "if I didn't, someone else would".
Abstract:
"We demonstrate that the Faithfulness property that is assumed in much causal analysis is robustly violated for a large class of systems of a type that occurs throughout the life and social sciences: control systems. These systems exhibit correlations indistinguishable from zero between variables that are strongly causally connected, and can show very high correlations between variables that have no direct causal connection, only a connection via causal links between uncorrelated variables. Their patterns of correlation are robust, in that they remain unchanged when their parameters are varied. The violation of Faithfulness is fundamental to what a control system does: hold some variable constant despite the disturbing influences on it. No method of causal analysis that requires Faithfulness is applicable to such systems."
Although I agree we can't justify anti-natalism as a policy on the effects of climate change, I think we can on the grounds of factory farming. That's because right now there are several farmed animals living in misery for every human in a developed nation.
But again, anyone who believes can just raise their child vegan and donate to an organisation like The Humane League. You'd think someone like that would, in expectation, raise a child who has a positive impact on non-human animal lives.
"if you don’t think your kid is going to make the world a better place in some way, why bother?"
I think that, historically, people have mostly had kids without regard to the effect they'll have on the world.
Those people aren’t the target of this argument, because those people aren’t considering global scale arguments for and against.
But also, if you asked those people whether they thought their kid would be a net positive or negative for the world, the vast majority would think the kid is a net positive. (I think the same is true if you ask them about the kid of a random couple who lives down the street, so that you can control for the fact that people vastly overestimate their own kids.)
I think it's safe to say I've followed this advice
> well-off, educated Americans are in the top 1% of people today in terms of how good their children’s lives are likely to be, and probably in the top 0.01% throughout history.
Nitpicking, but these numbers don't check out since >5% of all people who ever lived are alive today. (See for example https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-are-the-demographics-of-heaven/ and https://www.prb.org/articles/how-many-people-have-ever-lived-on-earth/).
Since the total number of people who have ever lived is estimated to be around 125 billion, saying that well-off, educated Americans (say the top 15 million) rank in the top 12.5 million of people who have ever lived isn't completely accurate, but adjust it slightly to 0.05% of everyone who has ever lived and you're definitely there.
It’s a larger scope, but I’d love a post from you about the antinatalism debate in general, more than just “I am grateful for my parents’ decisions here.” I don’t know how to meaningfully say that an experience can be “better” or “worse” than nonexistence, let alone decide whether a particular existence (e.g. my putative child’s) meets that bar. A lot of philosophy depends on the question of if/when life is worth living (e.g. population ethics/the repugnant conclusion), so it’s awkward for me to be undecided on the question.
Note to other commenters: this is just a suggestion of a post topic for Scott; I don’t receive notifications of comment replies so I will not see your arguments.
1) To add to the $30k offset point: If you're someone who lives a low-carbon lifestyle and for whom tackling climate change is very important, even aside from growing up to be a climate scientists or whatnot, *your kid will use less carbon than average*. They'll get cycled around, fly less, live in a well-insulated house with solar panels, have a vegetarian diet, etc etc.
2) I've seen a few arguments below that "people who say they are not having children for climate change are liars / self-deluded and are just rationalising a separate desire". This is a pretty unproductive statement. It's both broadly unprovable and belittling to the people involved, and presents no counter-argument. What is the purpose of making this argument?
Disclaimer: I am having children, and the climate/population impact was one of many considerations in my decision which I decided was OK based off of similar arguments to the post above.
Oh, this is about me. So, I agree that "people who say they are not having children for climate change are just rationalising a separate desire" is hard to prove, but I do not see that as bellitling.
You see an awful lot of emotionally charged moral rhetoric from pro-natalists (e.g. in this thread), so I find it very understandable that people who are not comfortable with having children have resorted to a sort of its mirror image.
One purpose of such a statement is to suggest that focusing on climate change would be very ineffective at addressing fertility. And it probably is proveable if we were interested in doing longer term attitudinal studies.
When I see lists that have "ways to reduce carbon emissions" which include "not having kids", I always wonder why they don't also include "suicide". Wouldn't that also by very, very similar logic be even more effective? After all, I'd guess a good portion of parents would literally sacrifice their lives for their children (and figuratively very often do so). Why is only one of those ideas considered appalling?
Well, if you think that hypothetical children-to-be-born should be considered equivalent to born children (or adult) lives, the carbon footprint of a child will be the least of your philosophic and moral problems...
Thank you
Putting aside the topic of climate change, I'm always somewhat fascinated by how little people realize just how drastically population dynamics have changed in the past 10-20 years.
We literally are in Peak Child right now - we'll never have more kids alive then when you are reading this sentence - and population will peak in the next 30 years or so, fall slowly for a couple decades then really pick up speed. The only things that could deter this would be 1) a new baby boom or 2) huge increases in longevity.
The former seems to me to be extremely unlikely - outside of Africa, there are no countries with a fertility rate above replacement and within africa it's declining more or less universally - and the latter is just kicking the can down the road.
EDIT: There are FEW countries outside Africa with fertility above replacement. There are some quite notable ones (India).
Israel. TFR ~ 3 last I checked.
I remember the "Peak" start stated with "Peak Oil", which was forgotten after fracking expanded oil supplies. John Landgraf of FX started using the phrase "Peak TV" years ago when there was a lot less TV than there is now. I doubt you're right about "Peak Child" if we look long enough into the future.
Demographics is a weird science in that you can't find more people like you can in other areas (e.g. oil). People aren't hiding under rocks somewhere, and the only direction it can really go is down due to disease, war and similar events.
Disease and war have been around for quite a while, during most of which time population has been trending up, not down. If it goes down in some countries in the next few decades the reason will be, not disease and war, but people choosing not to have children.
I meant: Disease and war not accounted for by current modeling. In theory it could get better. But the downside to population under, say, World War III or even another significant war wipes out people in a way that no campaign to urge population growth has ever worked historically.
China is learning this to their grief right now: Lowering the TFR was easy. Getting people to repopulate into a society that is no longer multi-child centric is just trying to unring a bell that can't be unrung.
The cultures that are still multi-child centric can simply replace the ones that aren't.
Of course it can go up via natural increase.
Where is your source indicating the "then really pick up speed?" I thought the prognosis was that once developing countries reach "peak urbanisation" along with minimally established education, all cultures will lower fertility rates below replacement levels.
I presume he means that population *decline* will really pick up speed, though I suspect if it got to that we'd see heavy pro-natalist policies being implemented.
Am I misunderstanding you or are we in violent agreement? TFR will continue to plummet, and as society greys in terms of average age, the world population decline will accelerate.
Africa however will almost certainly grow unless there is a dramatic shift in TFR in the next 50 years. It won't be quite as large as Asia most likely but it will be very, very close.
I misunderstood you. I think Africa will reach peak faster because it will be last area to be invested in which means for all foreign investors who want to maximize their return, only Africa will be the large field to do so.
According to a recent poll, 56% of UK 16-25 year olds think the world is 'doomed' due to climate change: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-58549373
There were some studies on what it would actually take to destroy human civilisation (which is what I imagine when I hear 'humanity is doomed'). Can't find the source but it's something like - we burn all the remaining fossil fuel reserves, shoot the temperature up by 12 degrees in a few decades and kick the climate into a venus-like hothouse equilibrium, and then forget to move the survivors to Antarctica over the decades we have.
What's the most realistic and charitable reading of 'doomed' and the most plausible route to it, that I can imagine? If you take everything in this very doomery 80k hours podcast (https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/mark-lynas-climate-change-nuclear-energy/) as a given (despite all the good criticisms Robert Wiblin offers) you might just get 10% population loss from a super-duper ultra cascade famine that very suddenly knocks global food production down 20% in a couple of years (which we've somehow not prepared for in any way). This would look more like worse than Spanish flu better than Black Death type situation, would be an unimaginably bad disaster, but this itself is the unlikely tail risk to worry about.
And the Black Death didn't destroy civilisation or even destabilize a single region of the world!
And I'm just guessing here, but in a certain sense this 56% of young people are even wronger than e.g. creationists or Qanon believers because Qanon believers don't falsely believe most domain experts agree with them, and I bet most of that 56% think 'doomed' is what the scientific consensus is.
What's worse is the bbc article all about avoiding climate anxiety doesn't say (Again being extremely charitable to climate doomers) 'Oh btw remember that outcomes where many hundreds of millions of people die in a short timespan are highly unlikely and require multiple independent things to go wrong at once'.
I really have trouble understanding how the consensus can be this wrong about something that could be trivially easily checked by just asking the scientists involved.
I think a lot of people are using "humanity is doomed" very, very loosely, in a way that would include a Black Death or even WWII-sized amount of destruction and disruption.
I earlier gave the Mencken quote about imaginary hobgoblins. He views their creation as the aim of "practical politics," but I think it is something broader. The media have an incentive that has nothing to do with politics — doom is a good story that sells papers. Beyond that, there is some reason why people enjoy imagining doom, civilizational collapse, and the like.
Reminds me of the internet comments when Pinker posted some articles on his research on the recent progressive trends on most measurable dimensions. Some people are really inflamed by the idea that the world isn’t doomed. Suggesting that the world has been getting better in some ways
really bothers some people.
There seemed to be a trend in the 19th and early 20th C to be an irrational optimist feeding the gods of progress. Now we see more people lean the opposite way. If I was a psychologist, I would love to do a study of what is making these folks tick.
I read "Doomed" as: I think things will get worse until something really bad happens, before getting better.
Thus, the hopelessness.
It's in the US as well. All these Zoomers grew up in a society where compassion and collectivism were totally secondary in prestige to individualism and STACKING FAT CASH, and are reacting logically to their environment IMO.
I guess it's because scientists themselves talk in terms of "the consequences will be catastrophic". Except by "catastrophic", the scientists mean something like "many of the species we like to study will go extinct", and ordinary people interpret it as "we're all gonna die".
Guilty as charged, haha. I can't tell you how many impassioned discussions about molluscs and ocean acidification I've been party to over the past decade. (Though the human impact is not zero, either.)
My personal interpretation of "humanity is doomed" is the end of the post WW2 progress in individual liberties and average standard of living, especially in western democracies (i believe they are linked, and also a necessary condition for actual democracies). And I do not see this doom happening in the future, I think we are in it, since the nineties probably. No mass starvation or climatic apocalypse or serious plague or anything worth of a catastrophe movie...more the triumph of the china societal model, but minus their emergence of a middle class and fast SoL increase (that may be halted anyway)
Thank you for the link.
"Apocalypse Never (My Utopian Vision)"
https://link.medium.com/TwDtjmAO2bb
I think we should go back a step farther and question the premise: that you not having children today has ANY impact on the future world population. That premise is entirely unfounded. I don't understand why it isn't questioned more.
If I went to NYC and sterilized 50% of the rats, how do you think that would impact the rat population of the city 3-4 years from now? I predict it would have no impact at all. (Assuming a rat lifespan ~2 years.) That's because the rat population of NYC isn't based on the reproduction rate of rats. Neither is the population of the Earth. Both have potential reproduction rates that far exceed their actual rates.
If human population levels were determined by reproduction rate, we wouldn't have seen stable populations for thousands of years, and then sudden exponential growth when crop yields improved dramatically these past few centuries. Individual decisions don't matter, because they're not part of an isolated system. Only systemic decisions matter.
Say you were planning to have a child and send them to Yale. Scott says they could become a future climate engineer and discover new ways of capturing carbon. Instead, someone who was going to go to a State school ends up at Yale and discovers the next generation of fracking technology. But why stop there? There's a slot open at the State school, after all. That gets filled by someone who ends up as a project manager, but who otherwise would have been an electrician. The electrician is replaced by someone who would have done drywall. Now we need another drywaller, who comes across the Southern border from any one of a number of nations we in the US collectively refer to as "Mexico", to the chagrin of culturally diverse heritages. We trace your decision all the way back to some tenement in Guatemala, El Salvador, or maybe Nigeria. The specific pathway doesn't matter. What matters is that someone else decides to have one more child because you decided to have one fewer.
This should be intuitive, but I don't understand why it isn't. The birth rate in the US has been well below replacement rate for generations now, yet the population continues to grow along with the global population. That's because the US imports that population growth, as we have for nearly all of our history (even before the birthrate dropped below replacement). Your decision not to have children is a decision to let someone else raise the next generation. Nothing more.
I'm not sure what you're saying.
The rat population would be the same 3 years from now because it hits carrying capacity.
We're not at Earth's carrying capacity (given technology), so reproducing more should increase population until we reach it, which will be after whatever global warming stuff is going to happen happens.
I agree colleges are at carrying capacity, but that's not the same argument.
I agree most US growth is through immigration, but number one, I don't think immigration officials look at current growth before deciding how many immigrants to take, and number two, even if they take fewer immigrants because of your kid, that potential immigrant still exists in their own country.
It's true that we're not technically at the carrying capacity of the Earth, but that capacity isn't a static number. It changes with new technologies - including political innovations. If you're the Ukraine in the 1930's, despite being one of the most fertile places on the planet, your 'carrying capacity' is millions of people fewer than your population. Yet gradual improvements across the globe - whether of technological innovation, political improvements, or just plain improved ability to move somewhere better - have resulted in cumulative increases in global carrying capacity over the past few centuries.
[Not to be confused with "a world we would like to live in", we could conceivably continue to increase carrying capacity for many more billions of people. (Though obviously not infinitely, since the Earth is a finite system.) Back in Malthus's day that appeared to be less than a billion people. And indeed, if they'd had today's population there would have been mass starvation and death. If we continue to improve agriculture, we can assume population levels will continue to increase as they have in the past. And if those don't improve, population will not.]
Let's call US immigration policy an emergent phenomenon as opposed to looking at it as a set policy. When the economy isn't doing well, not as many people come here (legally or otherwise) and when it's doing great more people come here, regardless of what the official policy is.
Maybe an argument against having more children is that your child will increase the carrying capacity of the US (and by extension the planet)? Perhaps 1st worlders having more children will have a multiplier effect on economic growth that will allow other people to have more children as well? Maybe more so if your child goes into agriculture research, or improves global sustainable supply distribution mechanisms.
I'm not sure I like the implications of that argument, though. It seems to imply that certain types of altruism - those that relieve suffering and promote human flourishing - are net-negative for humanity; that we should be looking to make third-world people suffer and not want to have children, that we should build 'big beautiful walls' around national borders to keep economic gains from going to those most likely to use them to support a higher birthrate, and at the extreme that refugees should be abandoned to their fate. Maybe there's another way to push the economic incentives toward lower population - one that doesn't involve starvation - but it seems to point in the opposite direction to economic growth.
Perhaps the more straightforward answer is a political one, but that's still not simple. You could impose a global population growth rate limit, but that kind of requires either a one-world government, or strict immigration laws of the kind that would make Trump blush. (E.g. no immigration from a nation with a birthrate higher than yours, legal or otherwise.)
Different people appear to make their reproductive decisions based on different limiting factors. For some it may be out of concern for the future, for some food availability, for some their prospects for a better life in their country or their ability to move to a different country. I'm saying the marginal decision at a population level to increase the global population by 1 is not directly tied to an individual's decision to have a child. Basic biology should make this point obvious, yet somehow there's a collective assumption that it applies to every other species than humans. Humans don't escape basic biology when they improve carrying capacity. They can influence the factors involved, sure, but that's different than dismissing basic biology because 'humans are different'.
To be clear, I'm not claiming you or anyone else is explicitly doing this. But it seems an implicit assumption to look at continuous incremental increases in population and blame individual choices more than continuous incremental improvements in technologies to feed, clothe, and house people. That's what drove population increase in the past. We haven't done anything fundamentally to change that dynamic, so why would we assume it is different now?
Education for women lowers the reproductive rate.
So you really want yourself, or your (hypothetical) children to live a carrying-capacity lifestyle ? That sounds pretty grim to me. Yes, I do agree that turning the Earth into Coruscant is inevitable in the long run, but deliberately speeding up that process sounds counterproductive.
Good point. If the argument is, "you're accelerating toward carrying capacity by having more children who increase economic output" there's no reason to restrict this argument to your children. By this logic, if you're making a net-positive contribution to economic output you're improving carrying capacity. We could go further and say increases in the capital stock will likely cause enduring improvements in carrying capacity - especially research or intellectual contributions.
What should we do, then? Quit our jobs and try to live off the welfare system? Is that enough, or should we all just go online and make counterproductive comments that suck up productivity? Maybe if we're clever enough we could make people stupider for listening to us or get people to distrust scientific research. Death to progress!
/s, of course.
My point was really a lot milder than your (admittedly sarcastic) take: when making decisions, we should not consider as our target the absolute limit of what the Earth can support; but rather, what it can support *comfortably*. To use an extreme example, humans can survive pretty much indefinitely in tiny sealed capsule apartments while eating ration bars -- after all, astronauts live pretty much like that, and they don't even have gravity -- but I don't want to build a world where such living conditions are the norm.
I agree. I guess I just don't see a path to a world where we're controlling resource utilization based on an agreed upon population limitation, as opposed to a current-carrying-capacity limitation. The norm right now is to just keep pushing capacity higher and higher.
The proposal for selective sub-populations to limit their reproduction in an effort to push against the larger biological reality has never seemed like a real solution to me. Seems more like a good way to selectively breed those sub-populations out of the gene pool, such that over time you'll encourage high-reproducing sub-populations to expand into the niches left behind by low-reproducers.
Either way, eventual population size isn't really determined by reproduction so much as by other factors. At most, replacing low-reproducers with high-reproducers would help human population levels bounce back after apocalyptic scenarios. But "post-apocalyptic resilience" isn't the stated purpose of these self-selective breeding campaigns. If it were, their popularity would likely suffer.
"do agree that turning the Earth into Coruscant is inevitable in the long run"
I don't. Since all first world countries are having problems keeping the birth rate *up*, I think it is is fairly inevitable within a few centuries that the world will have stabilised at a 2.1 birth rate.
This assumes that Yale transforms a young kid into a genius, instead of Yale having the sorting skills to find the child genius and get him admitted to their ranks and branded with Yale® to recruit future child geniuses.
Yale education:
12% Transformation
44% Branding
44% Networking
Hmm, I found myself nodding along with the arguments and feeling smug that my desire to have children is validated. So, you know, alarm bells going off for me.
Uh, I can't remember what the next step is after you notice yourself feeling smug after reading something you agree with - can anyone remind me?
Look for someone intelligent arguing the other side.
There are enough idiots out there. If you have the brains to read Scott, your kid can make the world better. Just no lawyers please!
This I like.
I do not think that global warming is central to the argument, any scenario where having a growing # of people on earth would make average life quality of people decrease would basically be the same regarding the morality of having more/less children. In fact, given how controversial global warming is (regarding severity and timescale for example), maybe using global warming will detract analysis of the fundamental issue.
So what are the arguments against having less kids if a growing population means decreased standard of living?
It seems it boils down to:
- the effect of one individual decision is negligeable because it's the global population increase (or, at "worst", regional population increase) that condition your children well being......welcome to the tragedy of the commons :-(
- group size influence it's political weigh and capacity to defend/promote it's prefered way of life, so not having children may improve your group well being w.r.t. global population, but this is always less than the loss of political influence of the group your child will likely belong.....welcome to natality warfare :-(
- on average a kid may be a net loss, but my kid will be better than average so he will be a net gain...errrrr...even if it is very likely true, can you say that in polite left-ish society?
Those arguments are not without merit (they really decrease the interest of having less kids if the well being of your kids is what you try to maximize)....but there are really machiavellian in nature (it's the traitor strategy in prisoner dilemna) and I am extremely surprised to see that from Scott....
Sorry, the last argument is in fact not a traitor strategy....but it's definitely non-egalitarian and probably the one that will get you ostracized the most in the current culture...
Population outside Africa is stable, and total population is going to stabilize within a few decades. It's currently controversial whether higher or lower populations are better for everyone else - higher means it's more crowded, but also that there are more people thinking up ideas and moving the economy along for everyone else. Keep in mind that most people now would prefer to be in the more populated (countries, cities, states) than the least populated ones.
For sure. I do not think demography is a reason to get panicky ATM (nor is global warming, even less so in fact....so people know where I stand)...But I am reasoning in the abstract, from a premise where on average, one more kid will decrease the standard of living of everybody (infinitely so, but decrease - BTW, in the 70s, when the population scare was all the rage, it did make sense to worry. I think it did far more sense to worry about it then that to worry about green house gases now).
This is the core of the argument (what's a negative effect of growing population on average well beeing should tell us about having (a lot? above replacement level? any?) children), and a very EA one...hence my surprise and my suspicion we may see a second post on this soon-ish :-)
There is absolutely a level of density where "we need to control and ideally stop population growth, now" becomes a common opinion. From experiences in my own country and elsewhere it seems to reach that point around 800/km2.
I did the computation:800 is really high.. II guess you are talking about small region or even city - state, because i all in a small country at half this density and it's already an anomaly that would not scale to a larger country...
I know it's high, but perhaps not as high as you might think, and in any case I think that the level at which such views become commonplace *should* be a lot lower.
I am from Belgium, the average in my country is 370p/km², but the northern region is smaller and more densily populated, 490p/km². 370 is already not confortable, but 490 is clearly too high: there is a housing issue in the north, like there is in the netherlands (419p/km²). So you can say that for a typical European way of life, 400 is the limit. Above that it's not like people will starve or die of epidemics, but they will not be able to live the life they could enjoy if the density was lower at an equivalent income. For an American way of life, I guess it's lower than that, probably 200.
Of course, translating that to a city instead of a country makes no sense: cities import food and people can travel outside very frequenctly if they want non-urban surrounding
"Population outside Africa is stable, and total population is going to stabilize within a few decades"
Population outside Africa is not IMO 'stable' and is unlikely to 'stabilise' at any point in the foreseeable future. Population sizes in some countries are temporarily at the cusp of an inverted parabola because collapsing birthrates have been offset by declining mortality. On a longer-term basis, populations are either going to collapse messily in most of the developed world, or wind up being rescued by longevity treatments (which will lead straight back to population growth.)
On even longer timescales there's likely to be both genetic and cultural selection for increased fertility, but a lot of things could happen on longer timescales and most predictions go out the window.
There is no good reason to believe that an increasing population leads to a decreasing standard of living. That was the core assumption of the population scare of the sixties, and its predictions were the opposite of what has actually happened since then.
That's, i think, the only way out from an EA point of view, you have to challenge the premise (the idea that life will be worse, on average, if you have more people on earth) . I said "i think" cause i am not really into EA, but i think our host is and this post is really untypical. BTW, i think that indeed, at this point of demography and technical possibilities, more people will result in decreased standard of living even accounting for progress, but that is perfectly debatable. It's the other arguments that seems incompatible with EA (but compatible with a more "selfish" (and more natural imho) philosophy where people care about the well being of themselves, their family and friends far more than strangers).
I mean the Earth has a limited amount of resources.
Just curious, what is does Holland risk with rising sea level? Are the such old hands at holding back the sea that they are in good shape even seas rise faster than projected?
> the Netherlands can probably cope with a rise of around 1-1.5m in sea level, while 2m or more will require a total rethinking of current defences
https://www.dutchnews.nl/news/2019/12/as-sea-levels-rise-how-long-until-the-netherlands-is-under-water/
Scott mention 0.5m rise up to 2100.
That article mentions 3mm/year + 5mm/years subsidence of ground.
The inverse of not having children (for the various reasons a couple chose not to) are the pro-natalists who think an endless supply of human progeny to prop up a system of extraction and destruction to maintain their status quo living standards as a 1st-Worlder are why we're in the situation we face. When we have an entire political party centered around the idea that conservation of resources and the environment are just virtue signaling and then enact policy or personal actions directly inverse to 'own the libs' is another reason why it's so difficult to make incremental changes. Not to mention the vested interests of industries whose entire business model is based upon maximal extraction and burning of fossil fuels regardless of the externalized negative impacts of doing so.
People have a myriad of reasons to have children and not have children. I question the rationale of couples who think they need more than two but I'm not going to propose passing policies to curtail that decision but I also don't think we need policies that encourage it either. The most common excuses I hear are "I came from a big family," "I love children," "blessed be the fruit of the womb," and the underlying narcissism that the world should be blessed with more than 2 of them (regardless of one's ability to afford more than 2.)
That aside, Scott's premise that more Democrats should have kids precisely because their kids need to counteract Republican breeding stock numbers because of climate change, might be appropriate if elections were structured around a popular vote but we don't have that. I live in Louisiana and even if I had 500 kids, it would have no impact on the overall conservative stranglehold on the State's legislation nor the stranglehold that the extraction industries have on the state for the foreseeable future. I suspect a very-left liberal in Austin couldn't breed fast enough to counteract the overt gerrymandering by the GOP to lock in conservative control for decades to come nor the cultural affinity for oil & gas that strangles Texas.
My concerns about climate change on my two kids are not future existential risks when they're 80yrs old. Moving hours or states away from my wife's extended family right now isn't an option. My concern is that the natural world I grew up with has drastically been altered and diminished over the last 40yrs that the impacts of climate change aren't in the future. My two young kids' 'normal' is an environment that is less wild. For a majority of Americans (regardless of political persuasion) this is not a big deal because they don't really care.
Educating my kids about the natural environment, giving them the tools and curiosity to not just simply observe but care for it in the limited ways we can is what I'm focusing on. Building in resiliency is another. But people are deluding themselves if they think the larger and more negative impacts of climate change are 80 years away before the collective 'we' have to act is why we keep kicking the can down the road.
Environmentalists, technologists, climatologists, scientists, and others concerned about the long-term effects of climate change on future humanity are driving them to accelerate solutions despite the complacency of status quo'ers. Do I think having a few kids will doom the world? No. Do I think not having kids will doom the world? No. I think it's the current crop of adults that will manage to do that nicely before we get around to doing the hard work necessary to accelerate carbon reductions and reversing stupid policy decisions that encourage waste and inefficiencies for profit.
The 1st-world has managed to stave off the catastrophic affects of severe drought and water shortages in parts of the Western U.S., but just like low-lying coastal areas, some populations will probably need to relocate sooner rather than later. Areas of the desert Southwest will have to shrink or stop existing because it will be unsustainable to do so without consistent water supplies. Agriculture & livestock production will have to be forced to rethink how it operates in areas where it doesn't make sense - like livestock crop farming and other water-heavy crops in West and Southwest.
I think it's rather unfair to assume or count on future generations to fix the problems they didn't create or will inherit when we know the causes and have the necessary technologies to fix now but are collectively too selfish to do so.
"we know the causes and have the necessary technologies to fix now but are collectively too selfish to do so"
More accurately, the cost of fixing it now would be greater than the cost of doing nothing
"I question the rationale of couples who think they need more than two"
How about, they want more than 2 and their kids will make the world a better place? Seems pretty easy to understand.
"an entire political party centered around the idea that conservation of resources and the environment are just virtue signaling and then enact policy or personal actions directly inverse to 'own the libs'"
Are you talking about Republicans here? You think the Republican party is centered around the idea that conservation is virtue signalling??
"I suspect a very-left liberal in Austin couldn't breed fast enough to counteract the overt gerrymandering by the GOP..."
Come on, think on the margin here?
Actually, I don't think the cost of fixing it now would be greater than the cost of doing nothing, unless you're relying on global depression to drive the future cost to zero. It's a question of whether or not you think 'costs' are strictly limited to just economic outputs.
I've never met a family that had more than 2 kids who gave the reason 'my brood of 5 kids will make the world a better place.' The usual response has been 'just because' which I find less convincing than the reasons a couple gives me for not having children.
The current Republican party has the stance that environmental conservation is performative virtue signaling. Are there outliers? Yes but the majority of officeholders seem to express that viewpoint.
Honestly, I think people having kids for political purposes is the worst reason to have them.
I've literally never heard anyone in politics say that environmental conservation is performative virtue signaling. Can you give me an example of what you are talking about?
The most prominent example is Dick Cheney's position that conservation is a sign of personal virture. The Bush Administration gutted funding for the Federal Energey Managment Program by 48% and since the Bush era the GOP position on any energy policy that incorporates or prioritizes renewables or efficiency/conservation doesn't exist.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/may/10/dickcheney.martinkettle
"The usual response has been 'just because'"
And that is the only reason anyone should ever need.
If that's the only reason anyone should need to justify having children then we don't need to question the reasons or impune the motives for why people chose to not have children.
Indeed. I have no issue with people who do not want children, just as I have no issue with families with 5+ children.
"I'm not going to propose passing policies to curtail that decision but I also don't think we need policies that encourage it either."
I think the choice to have kids or not have kids is also dependent upon the size family one grew up in. For example, I have friend that was an only child of two parents who were only children of parents who were only children. Conversely, I have one sibling and most of my cousins were 2-child households. All of us have had one/two kids. I married into a Catholic family. My wife's parents had 4 kids and she has 25 cousins who've all married and have at a minimum of 2 kids. The family Christmas is comprised of 60 people. It's overwhelming at times and other times very joyous.
But I'm happy w/ 2 kids and I don't think my wife and I could handle the stress of more. I mean, sure have 5 kids but 10?
"The inverse of not having children (for the various reasons a couple chose not to) are the pro-natalists who think an endless supply of human progeny to prop up a system of extraction and destruction to maintain their status quo living standards as a 1st-Worlder"
Guilty as charged, more or less. That world seems a happier one than the one where we reduce living standards by 10% to avert .1% of harm from climate change.
"The most common excuses I hear are "I came from a big family," "I love children," "blessed be the fruit of the womb," and the underlying narcissism that the world should be blessed with more than 2 of them (regardless of one's ability to afford more than 2.)"
What's wrong with the "excuse" of "I love children?" Would you say "I'm having gay sex because I enjoy having gay sex" is an "irrational excuse?" As to "narcissism," you seem to think the world would be a better place if people were more similar to yourself at least as far as policy preferences go. So it seems that it's the method, not the end goal, that you have a problem with. As to the problem of people having kids they can't afford and burdening the rest of society with the cost, the easy solution is to cut off the welfare spigot, but I'd guess you'd be hostile to that idea.
"That world seems a happier one than the one where we reduce living standards by 10% to avert .1% of harm from climate change." By all accounts, the world is not a happier one because of the choices 1% have made to pretend their impacts have no negative externalities. The cost of not addressing climate change will have a bigger impact on living standards than pretending having more children will increase living standards.
There's nothing wrong with the excuse of saying "I love children" but natalists seem to think that's the only justification and demand a myriad of reasons why people chose not to have children or impune their choice not to have children.
"As to the problem of people having kids they can't afford and burdening the rest of society with the cost, the easy solution is to cut off the welfare spigot, but I'd guess you'd be hostile to that idea."
I'm hostile to the idea that natalist get their panties in a twist about low birth rates and their insistence that having lots of kids is the answer to what ails humanity. Lots of people who can afford kids can also result in those kids being a burden to society. If natalists and pro-birth folks want to back up their position then they would back policies that are pro-family after birth but that isn't what we see here in the U.S.
We could spend money on family-friendly policies that make it easier / less costly for middle and low-income families to have and raise children. Instead, we're running the natural experiment in some states that if we just cut SNAP benefits back enough then the children will be incentivized to bootstrap themselves into the 0.5% of income earners in a few decades.
There's no contradiction between being pro-natal in general while also wanting less of some categories of births. Most pro-natalists are pro-eugenics, even if they don't know it yet.
It is frankly horrific to me that some people are so thoroughly in thrall to politics that they would let it dominate their life choices to the point of controlling whether or not they have children. It's even more horrific to me that the mechanism of action of this thrall isn't, like, nazis pointing guns at people, but rather self-imposed and mediated by neurotic guilt. The fact of having that conversation at all should be a massive wake-up call to people that hey, maybe they need to walk away from the nightmare rectangle in their pocket for a while.
Also, #import my canned rant about how sickening it is that people feel the obligation to run mathematical calculations on utility and appeal to authorities, out of some perverse need to always have something else they can point to to justify their decisions, instead of just "I'm an adult human being with freedom and agency, and I'm allowed to make decisions about my life". The fact that the decision under discussion is one of the most natural decisions that have ever existed, a decision that has already been made _billions_ of times, by people who definitely didn't bust out a spreadsheet first, just emphasizes this even more
Remember when we all agreed that "politics is the mind killer"? I 'member
> how sickening it is that people feel the obligation to run mathematical calculations on utility and appeal to authorities
What about letting adult humans being with freedom and agency, to make decisions about their life like they want, without shaming them?
I think this is being uncharitable. A lot of people think the world is going to end in a really horrible way. It makes sense not to want to have children if they're going to live a horrible life and then die young. That's not a political decision.
Perhaps you're familiar with the term solastalgia. Glen Albrecht coined the term to describe the psychological stress that people were experiencing as they watched their immediate environment being transformed via natural disaster or man-made disaster. Albrecht coined it when studying the effects of strip mining in Australia on people who lived near open-cast coal mines. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20151030-have-you-ever-felt-solastalgia
I've discussed it in the past with my therapist when I was having a lot of stress as a result of work and other impacts that were happening locally, as well as what I observed to places I grew up that became exacerbated after I had my second child. The solastalgia wasn't bad enough to cause us to stop having kids but it did reframe how I was going to raise my kids moving forward, especially living in south Louisiana and the yearly disruptions that hurricanes, flooding, and tropical storms can cause. We're here because my wife has family here and they're a great support base. But that doesn't lessen the long-term concerns I have for my kids.
Relocating back to Colorado wouldn't relieve the impacts of climate change either. Considering I've watched my home state be transformed by continued drought and worsening fire season over the last 20yrs along with some not-so-smart development growth that has exacerbated water shortages and increased risks of wildfires along the wildland-urban interface.
I think your post brings up valid points about taking into consideration, the long view of future climate change impacts but I also think the immediate impacts can't be ignored especially for current parents and future parents.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2021/10/11/85-percent-population-climate-impacts/
politics is literally collective decision-making, mindkiller or not you wont be able to avoid it just try to make modern politics poison your group less often.
The argument about future elections seems flawed. It is not an accident that elections are very close: the parties are strongly incentivised to position themselves in a way that appeals to approximately the number of people they need to win elections. If you removed 1% of the electorate's left wing, the Democrats wouldn't sit there losing elections for ever, they'd just move slightly to the right until they picked up enough centrists to restore the equilibrium. So there is an effect on policy outcomes, but it's roughly proportional to the population change rather than being hugely amplified by elections as claimed.
Except it's a new phenomenon that elections are close. Democrats controlled the House for the 38 years between 1955 and 1993. If you look at past presidential elections, Reagan won the popular vote by 59% vs. 41%, and the electoral vote by 525 vs. 13.
Right, there used to be a lot more variance in presidential elections, but my point is about the averages. What I'm claiming is you couldn't have variance as low as today, but where (say) one party consistently gets about 400 electoral votes and the other 138. In other words, if it's going to settle anywhere, it has to settle on being close.
Your House example is more troublesome to my claim. But the same two parties run in multiple elections held under different systems, and presumably have to have a vaguely consistent platform across those elections. Perhaps aiming for the presidency and the Senate was enough to secure Republican policy priorities, so it wasn't worth them drifting leftward enough to be competitive in the House.
I don't disagree with the points you made, and I agree people should have children if they want without worrying about the impact on the planet of future generations although I do think you overlooked a part of the debate…a "no child carbon credit."
My reasons for not having a child are certainly not 100% based on the damage that future generations would do to the planet, however…I do consider the lack of damage done future generations when making decisions about my *own* carbon footprint.
I am not arguing that I should get a government carbon tax credit for not having children (although that would be nice for me, but make things worse for the world) but I am far less concerned about my consumption/carbon footprint because of how the math works out in the future if I do not procreate.
I don't know how familiar you are with Scott and his body of work. He is part of a community that spends a lot of time thinking about improving the lives of all people, which in practice focuses efforts on 'third world'. I assure you whatever you seem to be inferring isn't who he is. Is just a word choice that communicates what he is referring to not a loaded political view.
I might agree if the article were trying to solve the problem of whether people in general should have more or fewer children. But it's not--it's quite clearly advice addressed to the readership of this blog (i.e. almost entirely people in the wealthier half of the Western world) who are uncertain about having children either A) out of concern for those potential children or B) out of concern for, as you say, "members of the Second and Third Worlds and the entire natural world."
The argument to people with concern A doesn't hinge on the suffering of other people because if it did it would fail to address their concern. The question is "Is my child safe?" not "Are most children safe?", and it hardly seems monstrous or racist for a parent to be interested in the answer to that.
The argument to people with concern B clearly does value the lives and well-being of other people: its whole premise is that your decision to have a child or not is based entirely on whether it will cause strangers in distant places to suffer.
What terms would you prefer to use to refer to parts of the world that are highly economically developed and the parts that are not? What a weird comment.
I hear you that it feels strange to hear outdated references to the “First / Third World” even though so many of us moved on to “Developed / Developing World” years ago (which has its problems too but I’m not sure anything has replaced it). This crowd is not interested in staying current with socially acceptable language, but they have some good ideas. It’s worth looking past the language.
This user was banned for this comment. If they're going to be this nasty and confrontational over someone using the perfectly standard term "First World", I don't imagine them being a net positive here in general.
BTW, people use developed/developing or global north/global south now as first/second/third worlds are really anachronisms and misuses of Cold War concepts (i.e. Urugray and Yugoslavia technically are third world and they were/are modern developed societies)
One thing I find frustrating in this sort of conversation is the equivocation between "collapse of civilization" and "existential threat." (Scott isn't doing this too much, but the linked Vox piece definitely is.) The idea that climate change will literally cause human extinction is ridiculous. But the idea that climate change will bring down the governments of most countries, lead to mass movements that create new cultures and destroy old ones, and precipitate a century or two of techno-economic decline, political decentralization, and widespread small-scale warfare is... well, not necessarily likely, but plausible. If that's not a civilizational collapse, then no civilization has ever collapsed. More importantly, it's not an outcome bad enough to be treated as remotely similar to the extinction of the species.
These, too, are very implausible IMO based on the predicted effects of global warming, at least in richer countries (assuming that, by bringing down governments, we mean something more than some party losing an election or a president resigning—these can happen over much less).
To be clear, by "plausible" in this case I mean about 0.1%-1% chance--it's like developing schizophrenia or a bit less likely than that, not like developing lycanthropy. (Though you might think that range is still too high.) By "bringing down governments" I do mean forms of government, not administrations, particularly if they aren't replaced quickly and peacefully (e.g. the last decade in Libya). I don't think climate changes and natural disasters could do that directly in any developed country, but the destabilization of the rest of the world combined with economic troubles at home could.
I was disappointed in this post. I think Climate Change is probably Scott's weakest subject (of those he writes about) and sometimes sounds as if the information has been regurgitated from somewhere like Vox or the Guardian.
The 1% chance of Venus-like conditions is a good example. Hitchen's razor applies but I'd go straight to Nasa head honcho Gavin Schmidt who has variously described the odds of this scenario as "vanishingly small" and "essentially zero".
Or 'Probably trillions have already been lost to disasters and agricultural problems'. Again, Hitchen's razor is appropriate - the relevant literature says something quite different. Climate disasters account for about 0.2% of the world's economy and that proportion is falling not rising. And that of course is Climate, not climate change.
In a similar fashion to many people who worry about climate changing, it seems that imagination is what creates many of these guesses - and fear driven imagination at that.
An acid test is to ask whether the climate mortality rates of 100 years time will be higher or lower than those of 100 years ago. If you are familiar with any of the literature and you avoid just imagining stuff, you'll know that the climate mortality rate of the future will be a tiny fraction of that of the past.
Any casual review of crop yields over the past 150 years of warming (spoiler: they have increased dramatically, about 5x) would remove one's worry about losses already incurred.
https://ourworldindata.org/crop-yields
This doesn't mean there is zero impact, it just means that it is a small factor relatively and I very much doubt they can reliably measure a climate impact one way or the other. At the base level increases in CO2 help plant production.
I broadly agree that this isn't the best place for deep analysis of climate change, but I don't think your examples are very strong.
In context, the 1% figure for the Venus scenario was pretty clearly not Scott's actual belief--he is using a ridiculously high figure to make the point that it's not worth worrying about even if "everybody's wrong" about how unlikely it is, i.e. even if the experts are far too optimistic.
The world's cumulative real GDP over the past sixty years is over $2,500 trillion, more than $1,000 trillion of which was in the past fifteen years. If the cost of climate disasters was 0.2% throughout (though you say it was higher at the beginning of that period), then those disasters have in fact cost trillions. You are right to point out that that is climate, not climate change, but I think Scott's guess here is only off by an order of magnitude or so, which is forgivable given that it's flagged as a guess and he's not resting anything on it (in fact, if it's an overestimate that can only strengthen his case). Also, some costs of climate change, including agricultural problems, probably don't show up as "climate disasters."
Fair point about the 1% Venus scenario. If I'd read the article a little more attentively I hope I'd have picked a better example.
> sounds as if the information has been regurgitated from somewhere like Vox or the Guardian
That's exactly what it is, specifically Vox.
The Guardian would be worse.
I think there is an argument to be made that many of the approaches to reducing carbon emissions, certainly including declining to have children, are actually counterproductive, insofar as they erode general prosperity. A prosperous people are far better equipped to protect the environment than an unprosperous people. See recycling, for example.
If carbon footprint reduction is the real goal (a big if, sadly), then any steps taken in the name of that goal must demonstrably contribute towards it.
Of course a demographic EXplosion is very resource-consuming, but an IMplosion has serious economical implications that very much reduce the ability to protect the environment. It seems to me that a stable demographic is by far preferable.
I can take the NYC example in well enough, but then we are not just dealing with an isolated event that will only involve NYC, but a massive global event that will have ripple effects that will create as yet unthought of negative feedback loops. We're also dealing with the ongoing loss of biodiversity, ocean acidification, deforestation, food and water security, for starters. What will the future look like? Certainly not like your example of NYC.
Why do you think there is an ongoing problem with food security? Global per capita food supply at least is increasing (https://ourworldindata.org/food-supply). How will a loss of biodiversity, ocean acidification or deforestation affect me?
Humanity thrives in a very wide range of climates. We also have a wide variety of crops, producing food in a wide variety of climates. Even with complex ripple effects and large changes to the climate, the climate of most of the Earth would fall well within the range in which humans are living and doing fine right now.
You are looking at the present data before the effects of climate change. What happens after the climate actually changes? https://www.ipcc.ch/srccl/chapter/chapter-5/
As far as your personal world being affected by deforestation and ocean acidification you could just look at how an airborne virus has affected global supply chains because this is one effect that no one saw coming. I have no idea how your personal world will be affected by these calamities, but rest assured, it will feel the "pinch" because it exists within a larger, more complex system.
Those people who are immediately affected, do you think that they are just going to sit down and die? Some of them probably will, but most of them are going to shake whatever tree that's around and once they start shaking, reverberations, my friend, reverberations.
How confident are we that carbon emissions per person has been declining rapidly since 2000? https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions make it look like it has gone down moderately in Europe but not much in America.
there is also the "exports" to China of industry
I agree with your conclusion, but you should not be so willing to believe alarmist scare stories.
"This has already been pretty bad, with unusually many hurricanes, wildfires, and droughts."
The IPCC claimed that climate change had increased droughts in the fourth report, retracted that claim in the fifth. For hurricanes, a long discussion by Chris Landsea, who wrote a substantial part of one of the IPCC report's section on hurricanes is at:
hurricanes:https://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/Landsea/gw_hurricanes/
If you actually read the IPCC reports with care, instead of the news media, things look a lot less bleak. Here are some of my favorite quotes:
There is no evidence that surface water and groundwater drought frequency has changed over the last few decades, although impacts of drought have increased mostly due to increased water demand.
Economic losses due to extreme weather events have increased globally, mostly due to increase in wealth and exposure, with a possible influence of climate change (low confidence in attribution to climate change).
Some low-lying developing countries and small island states are expected to face very high impacts that, in some cases, could have associated damage and adaptation costs of several percentage points of GDP.
... most recent observed terrestrial-species extinctions have not been attributed to recent climate change, despite some speculative efforts (high confidence).
With these recognized limitations, the incomplete estimates of global annual economic losses for additional temperature increases of ~2°C are between 0.2 and 2.0% of income ... .
I was also struck some years ago by a piece written by William Nordhaus responding to a WSJ OpEd that argued that climate change was not a catastrophe requiring immediate response. His calculation at the time was that the net cost of doing nothing for fifty years instead the optimal policy starting immediately was about $4.1 trillion. Spread out over a century and the entire world, that works out to a reduction of average world GNP of about one twentieth of one percent. He didn't put it that way. You can find my comments on his piece and a link to it at:
http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2014/03/contra-nordhaus.html
Richard Tol characterised the non-alarming perspective (as an IPCC lead author) by suggesting a century of climate change would cost a year or two of economic growth.
We are having a debate here with completely different "facts" (assuming facts is a term we can use on multi decade model projections of complex phenomena).
David, you and I seem to be operating under the assumption of the IPCC scenarios which suggest that climate change is serious, with serious defined as requiring a couple of years extra time before average global income quadruples.
Scott (in an above comment) believes that it is quite likely that entire cities in Africa will be destroyed by draught, leading to millions dying of thirst.
Half the youth in London seem to believe that the risk is existential, meaning total civilizational collapse or worse?
Before we discuss whether or not to have a child, I think we need to narrow our assumptions a bit
Note that David and Scott position is not necessarily contradictory.
Some problem may be serious, cause millions of deaths and still delay general economic growth be few years.
AKA, "we really should do something serious about this" is not reserved for "we will all die" type of problem.
That is true, but both of us disagree with the narrative that is used to argue against having a child, which is pretty close to "we will all die."
Two other points. Over the next century, we can expect, with or without climate change, something like ten to twenty billion deaths, so a few million mean a change of something like .1%. Economic growth can be expected to reduce death rates, via increased life expectancy, by much more than that, judged by past experience.
Also, "cause millions of deaths" is a bit ambiguous. Rising temperature may well increase the number of people who die over the next century from heat by several millions. It may also decrease the number who die from cold by several millions. Does that count as "cause millions of deaths"?
Finally, ACT on the most-talked-about scare of the day.
Here is a take I have not seen in the media so far:
We are facing a moral dilemma when reporting & preparing for increased global warming, but it is not any of the usual suspects.
The actual moral dilemma is this: Is it ok to exaggerate how bad the effects of global warming (and accompanying climate change) already are, in order to get people off their arses & to do something to limit the risk of future runaway global warming, or should one always “tell the truth” ?
To elaborate: Global warming so far is modest, approx. 1,5 degrees from whatever you choose as the baseline. A modest increase usually has only modest consequences.
Ocean rise so far has been very modest. Climate change so far is also very modest.
If you read the underlying material (caveat: I have far from read the whole most recent IPCC report, but I have read chapter 3 and 11 in some additional bits, plus some of the underlying articles) you see some statistically significant climate changes across time, but statistically significant change is not the same as dramatic change. Some registered climate changes are statistically significant, but judging from the time series available you would be hard pressed to label any of them “dramatic”.
There are also some positive effects of the modest temperature rise we have seen so far, most notably deaths from extreme cold is declining – and at least in the Northern hemisphere, 95 percent of temperature-related death are related to cold peaks (not warm peaks). Plus, there is a greening-of-the-planet effect.
None the less, the response in the media these days whenever there is a forest fire, or a flood, or a heavy rainfall somewhere on the planet, is immediately to blame “global warming”. This may suggest conformation bias, and in any case we all know that monocausal explanations are usually wrong.
However, I want to offer an alternative explanation for the almost conditioned response of the media whenever they report anything related to “climate”: People in the media are morally dedicated people who know what they are doing, and what they do is deliberately playing up the present negative effects of global/working/climate change beyond what is strictly speaking “truth”, “for the good of the cause”.
I must stress that I am very open for the possibility that this is indeed a praiseworthy moral stance. But then again, it might not be. Hence we are facing a genuine moral dilemma – on behalf of people working in the media, as well as everyone else that is a potential opinion-leader. Including many ACT readers, I would recon.
To further elaborate the dilemma: If we instead tell the present-day truth, i.e. that the effects of global warming are modest so far, people (i.e. the great unwashed) may become complacent, and not geared up to “do something”, or at least “accept something”. Implying that if/when continuous global warming starts to bite for real, it is too late to do something.
How to respond to this moral dilemma? It depends on whether you are a Kantian or a Machiavellian (yes, Machiavelli has a moral theory).
If you are a Kantian, you should never tell a lie. Not to tell a lie is a principle, and you should follow principles regardless of the consequences. If you follow your principles, you can disregard if the consequences of your acts are desirable or not. (The Germans have a wonderful word for this moral stance: Prinzipentreue – to your principles always be true.)
Thus if a Kantian, you should never exaggerate present-day knowledge that global warming so far has had only modest negative effects, and may even have had some positive effects. If the effect of “telling this truth” is that people become complacent and global warming wrecks havoc on the world a hundred years from now, so be it. You told the truth – come hell or high water (levels).
If you instead are a Machiavellian, you believe that what is ethically important are the consequences of your acts, not if your principles are “pure”. Instead, the end justifies the means. (A saying often ascribed to the Jesuits, but Machiavelli is also a representative of this view.)
If a Machiavellian, you can defend to exaggerate (tweak the truth) as regards the consequences of global warming so far, in order to “wake people up” to do something/accept restrictions, and thus to limit the probability that global warming spins out of control 50/100 years from now.
Finally getting to Scott's worry: That some young people become so hysterical due to these media exaggerations that they abstain from having children can be regarded as a sort of collateral damage.
If you are a Machiavellian, this is an acceptable negative side-effect. Kantians would be horrified, but then they would be horrified anyway, at any exaggeration of present-day consequences of global warming.
So this is the moral question we should ask ourselves: Is it ok to exaggerate the consequences global warming already have, in order to lower the probability that global warming spins out of control in the future, or is it always wrong to exaggerate what is our best knowledge?
The answer probably lies in another question: Do you actually read the media's climate reporting any longer? I rarely do because of the problem referenced. If a large segment of the people believe you are exaggerating then you have lost the credibility to achieve your objective.
I would suggest a lot of this exaggeration is much more mundane than a grand moral dilemma, fear sells and the accountability for overselling this particular fear is always decades away to a new reader.
It's basically the "noble lie" argument. I discuss it in some detail in one of the chapter drafts I have webbed recently:
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Ideas%20I/Libertarianism/Rights%20chapter.pdf
One problem is that, every time you do that, you increase the number of people who don't trust what are supposed to be the authoritative sources of information. One of my standard examples is Fauci, who openly admitted in a NYT interview that his statements about what is required for herd immunity change according to what he wants people to believe — specifically, that he was raising the estimate in response to polling evidence about how many people were willing to get vaccinated.
Eventually, people correctly conclude that the authoritative sources of information, whether Fauci or the NYT, cannot be trusted, so they might as well believe what they want to believe. I've been arguing on that basis that Fauci, generalized to lots of other people, is the reason that many Republicans believe the election was stolen. The reputable sources of information tell them, I think correctly, that it wasn't, but those sources also claimed that Covid couldn't have been a lab leak and that Hunter Biden's hard drive didn't show anything real and important, was just some sort of Russian disinformation. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.
And we are left with no way of coordinating the beliefs of the general population.
I'm curious your perspective on this... is it your sense that media and political leaders like the NYT and Fauci are bigger lying liars than we've had in previous eras and that's why we are left with no way of coordinating the beliefs of the general population?
It seems to me we've always had lots of big lying liars and that the problem now is that those big lying liars don't have as hegemonic a sway over public belief. I don't know where to start this decomposition of the hegemony of media and political leaders, but maybe from the Vietnam War and Watergate onwards (in the U.S. obviously) and then layering on the internet and social media.
My hope is we're on the way to somewhere else that this is an awkward middle phase for. In other words, that we needed to dethrone some of the authority of the big lying liars (since after all they had been lying about a great many things for a long time). But we're having to pass through the valley of "it's all just stories, man" on the way hopefully to some new way to assess truth claims?
> bigger lying liars than we've had in previous eras
I think that nowadays - for multiple reasons - it is easier to notice then in past.
I would expect that lying (or misleading earnestly held beliefs) are actually less often held by rulers. For example nowadays it is fairly rare for ruler to claim to be a God.
(it is also easier to spread lies that XYZ is a big lying liar what makes entire thing more complex)
Another perspective is that the religious wars and civil wars of the 16th and 17th century Europe was the last shake out period between lying liars. This time the ideologies are just more secular.
Interesting question. The experience that I think of as my loss of innocence, discovering that respectable academics I liked were willing to publish deliberately misleading information in order to persuade people to what they thought was the right conclusion, was in the late sixties.
(Described in this blog post: http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2014/11/implications-of-academic-dishonesty.html)
Thanks for sharing that, I went and read your post and the one you linked to in there. Those kind of first-hand experiences of how the sausage is made is enough to make a life-long vegetarian (metaphorically speaking).
I think of this dynamic as something like a distortion field. Like the more politically salient and contentious (or profitable?) an arena of research is, the more likely it's towards the center of a distortion field rather than out on the edges of it where things like sloppy statistics or the researcher's less-than-perfect protocols or excessive attachment to an outcome also distort results.
It's my assumption that this is a universal human dynamic of the sort "power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely." That it has always been so and that it plays out in science is infuriating and unsurprising (except it's always surprising when we encounter it first-hand and witness the bald egregiousness of it).
Maybe we could say that the internet and social media have elevated Discourse so much that more subjects are ever more prone to the distortion field, and so perhaps science is being ever more distorted than it was before. I don't know how to weigh that up against the fact that methods in science have gotten better over time. Or up against how much profit motive has ever more deeply infused the practice of science.
And then in my field (psychology) there's the whole other dynamic that the quality of research is generally so bad and the answers for people in need so inadequate that practitioners are constantly overreaching in trying to use "science" and "evidence" as a fig leaf to cover a vast stretch of uncertainty (sausage? I'm sorry...) that is so much bigger than can be covered by a fig leaf. I'm not really sure my mixed metaphor works there. :)
This gets my vote for best comment so far. May I be so bold as to suggest it should be promoted to a follow up post by Scott?
There are several excellent posts in the immediate thread above that are certainly worth a deeper dive, summed up by the succinct expression, "Machiavellian altruism (as this moral stance is sometimes called) has a signalling problem."
On many issues, including climate, COVID, and racism, the Blue Church starts from a legitimate foundation (each is a legitimate and important moral and policy concern), but then a selection mechanism develops in which congregants amplify messages that exaggerate on behalf of the "good cause" and penalize messages (and messengers) that do not exaggerate on behalf of the "good cause." Bit by bit more of us become Blue Church apostates because of the accumulated falsehoods that have become widely accepted dogmas within the church.
Some of the Blue Church apostates, no longer trusting the establishment, then accept all sorts of right wing craziness. The Blue Church establishment sees the craziness and doubles down on the on the enforcement of orthodoxy, in part because many of them now believe the most extreme exaggerations on their own side which are no longer based in empirical reality. This doubling down behavior includes the persecution of apostates and heretics, due to fear that if they allow dissenting voices back into the church, the right wing crazies will win. When apostate and heretic voices are no longer allowed, The Blue Church faithful now only hear the voices of the most loyal enforcers, which further constrains their view of reality. They then enforce this more constrained version, further limiting access to heretical information.
Rinse and repeat ad nauseam.
Honest brokers across partisan divides and ideological chasms, and those who support and promote such brokers, are our only hope.
I agree. And this gets to the real problem IMO. The existential threat is not and never has been climate change. The threat is politically inspired mistakes promoted by those exaggerating and weaponizing the issue against apostates. Making a silly list of real threats and my estimates of their likelihood going forward…
1. We do something stupid to fight climate change which derails the engines of prosperity causing the deaths and impoverishment of billions. (>25% chance)
2. The secular religion of the blue church drives apostates out of institutions and this results in a horrific backlash or civil war. This impoverishes billions. ( (>15% chance)
3.
4.etc
99. Climate change is so severe that it doesn’t just act as a headwind to human prosperity (as currently concluded by the IPCC) but that it leads to massive destabilization, poverty and death. (<1% chance)
Agreed as well. My wife is African, and the prospect of your #1 is all too real in Africa. Reliable, affordable energy is critical to advancing prosperity in Africa, and NGOs and multilateral institutions are already aggressively fighting fossil fuel development in Africa. For one of many case studies, Uganda is ready to bring their oil to the market but 250 NGOs are pressuring commercial banks not to lend money for the project,
https://panafricanvisions.com/2021/09/we-must-stand-with-uganda-and-call-for-just-energy-transition-and-for-investment-in-ugandan-oil-and-gas/
It is Orwellian to live in a world in which "black lives matter" but leading "altruistic" organizations are fighting hard to keep black Africa poor.
One could estimate African growth scenarios with and without affordable, reliable energy and thus come up with a decent calculation of how many black deaths (e.g. infant and maternal mortality declines pretty reliably with GDP growth, indoor air pollution due to cooking with biomass instead of gas or electric in 700 million African homes causes 1-2 million deaths annually, prosperity will result in other public health improvements, etc.) will be caused by these efforts to halt fossil fuel development and usage in Africa.
It should be obvious, but an Africa in 2100 with an average GDP per capita of $50K (or $80K) will be far better off than an Africa in 2100 with an average GDP per capita of $10K (or $20K). I'd like to see EA do various scenarios of the tradeoffs with respect to human life associated with X degree of growth in Africa vs. y temperature increase due to climate change.
If anyone has seen such analysis, I'd love to see it.
Thanks for this insight into how some NGOs behave in Africa. Shameful.
My prior (as they say in this forum) has been that rulers in African countries shake their heads and smile (in private) of high-income country worries of the distant global warming problem, since they have the more immediate problem of fighting abject here-and-now poverty. (As I believe rulers in India and China do, witness their steady introduction of new coal power plants.)
However, your post suggests that "green" NGOs may get the banks on their side. If so, perhaps they will actually succeed in slowing down African poverty alleviation for decades to come.
I would still assume, though, that such NGOs fight a losing battle in the long run, since any ruler not going for cheap electricity in a situation with widespread poverty may fear not to be a ruler for long.
Realistically, the only thing that can prevent rulers in low-and middle income countries from sooner or later firing up the coal and oil plants, is R&D that succeeds in creating alternative, stable power sources roughly as cheap as coal.
Nuclear and hydroelectric fit the bill, but the Greens do not like either of them. Solar and wind are too expensive and too unstable. Perhaps we may hope for breakthrough innovations in geothermal energy.
In lieu of R&D breakthroughs, "China to the African rescue" perhaps. The Chinese do not have the same "green" qualms as Western donors in their lending policies.
I am no fan of China's leader-for-life, but if decent governments in high-income countries neglect the basic interests of people in low-and-middle income countries, be not surprised if less-decent governments see a window of opportunity.
We are handing them the opportunity on a plate.
Big time agree. China Already 30% of the new power plants being built in Africa are by Chinese contractors partially controlled by the Chinese government,
https://www.power-technology.com/comment/chinese-investment-in-africa-2019/
Some of these are heavily polluting coal plants,
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3110554/chinese-cash-funds-african-coal-plant-building-despite
In essence Greenpeace and other NGOs are accelerating CCP influence over Africa.
Does this bode well for black Africa? Hmmm . . .
https://supchina.com/2018/02/23/china-has-no-problem-with-racism-and-thats-a-problem/
> The actual moral dilemma is this: Is it ok to exaggerate how bad the effects of global warming (and accompanying climate change) already are, in order to get people off their arses & to do something to limit the risk of future runaway global warming, or should one always “tell the truth” ?
Whether it's morally okay or not to lie, it doesn't even seem to have the desired effect. A decent fraction of the population is smart enough to realise that they're being lied to, even if they're not able to figure out exactly what the truth is on their own, and will reject the message. Hence we have the current state of the "climate debate" which is polarised between people who say "At this rate we'll be Venus by 2025" and people who say "Nope, that's obviously phony, global warming is fake, environmental problems aren't real". There's no room left for sensible discussions, and a good fraction of the population is now opposed to _anything_ you could do to help the environment because they associate environmental concerns with obvious lies.
A similar situation just played itself out in fast motion over the past couple of years with the pandemic. A lot of "noble lies" were told throughout the pandemic in order to try to influence people's behaviour. A lot of predictions were made which turned out to be vastly exaggerated, and a lot of specific actions were mandated which probably didn't have much effect. But the real problem is that when we finally had something we _could_ usefully do about the virus (getting a vaccine), a large fraction of the population (particularly in the US) noticed that the people telling them to get the vaccine were the same people who had been lying to them nonstop over every other aspect of the pandemic for the last two years.
As a result, a significant number of people are refusing to do the one very simple no-brainer action that you can take to protect yourself and others from a deadly disease because they've closed their ears after a couple of years of mask-related bullshit.
Yes to this, and for me it is a sadness that there is very little room for sensible discussions. If you survey the climate blogosphere, there is barely a single forum that isn't totally overrun with partisans of one flavour or another.
Excellent comment Melvin, especially the extension of the same issue to COVID. We also seem to have similar patterns with the current dialogues on racism, inequality and immigration.
> Is it ok to exaggerate the consequences global warming already have, in order to lower the probability that global warming spins out of control in the future, or is it always wrong to exaggerate what is our best knowledge?
I want just to say that people deliberately lying with this justification are fools, destructors and idiots. <insert link to Moloch essay before edits here>
Though there is probably quite large pool of people doing this not as deliberate lies, what is just stupid and destroying our ability to coordinate.
(Obviously, opposite - completely denying global warming etc is even worse as this has not even justification of exaggerating something that happens. Representatives of oil companies deliberately lying is something that should be illegal and so on.)
Beyond what others have said, there is another problem: There is no Inner Party. You may imagine that there is a Cabal of scientists, journalists, and perhaps random smart people like you, who know the Truth, and decides what to tell the Plebs in a Machiavellian fashion. If the Cabal knows that global warming is a moderate problem, but it also knows that the Plebs will take global warming less seriously than the Cabal tells them, then the Cabal tells the Plebs that it's a big problem, and the Plebs will then treat it as a moderate problem, just as they should.
But it doesn't work like this. The members of the "Cabal" mislead not only the Plebs, but also each other. After all, why do you think that it's plausibly a good thing to motivate people to get off their asses by exaggerating global warming? Because you believe that it's a big problem. Why do you believe it's a big problem? Perhaps because others have lied to you in the same manner. And *they* believed it was a big problem because they have been lied to in the same manner.
(In reality, I think it's not usually conscious lies as much as bias: they eagerly repeat any argument for it without checking, while they nitpick any counter-argument.)
Even journalists and smart people form their opinion about global warming based on what other journalists and scientists say. Even scientists only know the Truth at most about their very narrow field, but rely on journalists for everything else. A question like how alarmed we should be about global warming depends on many sub-questions (predictions of CO₂ emissions, the greenhouse effect of CO₂, the effect of feedback loops, the various consequences of a given amount of warming), and even if they have a correct picture of their own sub-field, they get an exaggerated picture of all the rest. And they can't warn each other, because they know that skeptics watch their communications (including scientific publications).
Even worse, while the Plebs are (as we see, justifiably) skeptical about what the "Cabal" tells them, members of the Cabal (scientists, journalists, other intellectuals) swallow it hook, line and sinker! After all, they are used to the notion that others in the Cabal, who are alarmed about global warming, are on the side of Science, and those who question them are stupid science-deniers.
So, say, the Cabal starts out correctly believing that global warming is a moderate problem. They say this, but the Plebs don't give a damn. So the Cabal starts saying that global warming is a big problem. Now the Plebs believe it's a moderate problem, but the Cabal now believes it's a big problem, since they believe each other's exaggerations! So they are worried because the Plebs only consider it a moderate problem, so now the Cabal says it's a catastrophic problem. And so on.
So we have a spiral, where we start out with some moderate belief, with moderate confidence, which is justified, and we end up deluding ourselves (or, rather, each other) without bound. This repeats in many controversies. E.g. doctors start out with a moderately confident belief that ivermectin probably doesn't treat COVID, and we end up—even before any new evidence emerges—at the point where everyone must be maximally against the possibility that it might treat it, and those anyone saying otherwise must be censored on social media.
Thanks for a really excellent line of reasoning 10240. I believe you are right: Machiavellian altruism (as this moral stance is sometimes called) has a signalling problem.
I am also enthusiastic about your attempt to generalize the logic at play here. The Elite signalling to the Plebs and in the process getting into a spiral of ever-stronger self-delusion might be at work across many policy fields, and across different political systems. (Digression: Albert “The good Nazi” Speer reflects in his autobiography Inside the Third Reich that a problem with making rational decisions inside an autocracy is that the elite gradually starts to believe its own propaganda.)
For the record: I agree with you that this is unlikely to be a fully conscious/deliberate process. Not least since we – due to the sheer information costs involved in forming accurate opinions on thousands of policy issues – instead form most of our political beliefs based on simple heuristics and cognitive rules-of-thumb. Like: who do you trust to normally be well-informed and sensible informants? (In principal-agent theory, such informed actors that others trust are labelled “intermediate agents”.)
This sets the stage for these perverse-signal-spirals, ending up perhaps deluding primarily members of the Elite themselves. And as you indicate this can be a serious problem, not least since the Elite – unlike the Plebs – actually have power.
So hey there is stuff here for an excellent political science article!! Maybe even a book.
An interesting follow-up question could be if there are ways Machiavellian altruists can overcome this signalling problem, or at least soften it?
Which is an interesting problem if you can assume that the alternative, always behaving like Immanuel I-cannot-tell-a-lie Kant, is unlikely to get the Plebs off their asses. (Bear with me and assume, at least for the sake of argument, that this is a real problem when it comes to global warming.)
Or are we stuck with a type of fatalism: “Things must get seriously much worse, so much worse that even a child can see it, before we can solve the moderate problem of global warming”.
I agree with this, tho' I think a lot of people can go from no information at all to outright panic without wandering up a feedback loop-spiral.
It seems that most of us head off in one of two directions (alarmed v anti-alarmed) just from our first framing, perhaps because of our dispositions. And confirmation bias + motivated reasoning is the fuel that keeps us heading in the same direction irrespective of reality - climate-wise we are all as mad as can be.
A blogger I know begins from the starting point that climate change is an EMERGENCY!! because "If human beings altering the climate isn't an emergency, then what is?" This initial framing is ever present so all new 'facts' have to fit in with this accordingly. It is therefore no surprise that after a decade or so of this process the blogger has begun to believe that the whole of classical economics needs to be overturned because it doesn't come up with sufficient climate damages to fit their fevered imagination. And this blogger isn't a hysterical environmentalist, he's a professor of physics!
Most of the * media reported * climate mantra is terrible and not well thought out. Climate change will have costs, but the alarmism is rampant, rarely challenged, and mostly incoherent.
News bulletin #1: Areas aren't abandoned because sea level rises ~1 inch per decade. Parts of New Orleans and areas of Europe have been getting along just fine living below sea level for quite a while. There are costs associated with this but they are increasingly manageable. Some areas are harder to protect than others.
News Bulletin #2: Lives lost to climate related disasters (notice the term not used: climate change related) have decreased markedly due to improved infrastructure and other technology, it is a fraction of what it was 100 years ago. The costs associated with these disasters is mostly even when normalized to GDP and the increasing amount of infrastructure exposed.
News Bulletin #3: People who live on the coasts (especially in the south) are not concerned with 3 feet of sea level rise in the next 80 years, they are concerned with up to 20 foot of sea level rise in a matter of hours. Hurricane storm surge. Coastal building codes are regulated around this. Higher seas mean higher storm surge but this apparent fantasy that people have where large coastal areas are abandoned is a near psychotic analysis of the situation. Any modern home in FL is typically built 20 feet above sea level and older homes must be brought up to code over time.
News Bulletin #3: Major hurricanes aren't measurably really getting worse over the past 100 years, and if they are they are getting worse it is at such a small level that it is not measurable yet due to the volatility of the spares dataset. Cat3+ landfalls over the past 100 years are about level, there was a noticeable decline around the 1970's which many activists like to start their analysis at, go figure. Summary:
https://twitter.com/rogerpielkejr/status/1333434593836318720
IPCC AR5: “Current datasets indicate no significant observed trends in global tropical cyclone frequency over the past century … No robust trends in annual numbers of tropical storms, hurricanes and major hurricanes counts have been identified over the past 100 years in the North Atlantic basin” ... “In summary, confidence in large scale changes in the intensity of extreme extratropical cyclones since 1900 is low” AR6 states increases since the 1970's but they haven't invented new ways to count hurricanes.
I find it more than a little interesting that the US had a record 11 year gap in major hurricane landfalls after 2006 and nobody noticed, but one or two active years is designated a climate change trend according to "science".
I spent a lot of time reviewing the evidence on hurricanes and sea level rise because I live in Florida. I haven't looked at wildfires in detail. I find the evidence and models to be lacking and the media to be overly biased and politically conformist (constantly treating RPC8.5 as BAU, etc). There is no particular reason to believe my take but all I can say is that the more time you spend reviewing the evidence the less trust you will have in the * reporting * of climate science. By all means go read the IPCC if you have the time and compare that to media reporting.
+1
people are evacuating islands in Louisiana, and the erosion and hurricanes clearly is affecting Louisiana enough that you see a noticeable difference from 1980s to currently from orbital pictures. Which means New Orleans has less and less land between it and storm surge...
To para-paraphrase Mark Twain paraphrasing Thomas Jefferson: "I'm an old man, and I've lived through many end-of-the-world as-we-know-it scenarios, and none of them ever happened."
As an undergraduate in Anthropology, I was trained to look for cross-cultural patterns of belief and behaviors. And something I've observed is that there's universal need in humans to believe that world is going to end in our lifetimes. For the scientifically inclined, we love to indulge in worst-case disaster scenarios. For the Christianists, it's a belief that Jesus is going to bring on the end-times any minute now.
As one of the former group, I used to indulge in "scientific" eschatology. I'm sure I'm missing a few, but, as a kid in Jr High School, I was told by my science teachers that pollution and acidification would likely kill off all the oxygen-producing algae by the 1980s. Around the same time, The Club of Rome was telling us that we were facing a Malthusian tipping point by 2000 where the world population would outpace our ability to produce food and energy. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Kostas Tsipis and another anti-nuclear activist (whose name I've forgotten) would make their yearly rounds to college campuses warning us that nuclear winter was inevitable if we didn't immediately disarm. Around the same time people started dying of HIV/AIDS, and the epidemiologists told us that as much as one-third of world's population would die horrible deaths. And I remember our campus health officer telling us that HIV could be transmitted through kissing or even touching (There were a lot of freaked out horny kids on campus!). It went on... The Ozone Hole was going expand and all life would die under unfiltered UV radiation. Peak Oil was going to cause an economic collapse by 2010. In 1988, James Hansen told us that Global warming likely raise sea-levels by 3 to 12 feet by early 2000's (flooding Manhattan). Then there was Y2K and the preppers were heading up to mountain redoubts awaiting the collapse of civilization (Luckily all our elderly COBOL programmers were lured out of retirement to change he dates from from two bytes to four bytes in all that old code).
Somewhere along the way I became more jaded. But for the first 40 or so years of my life I was pretty damn scared that world was going to end! Eventually I realized that none of the worst-case predictions came to pass, though. And, although I think our civilization may very be past its peak, I don't think it's anything we're expecting or predicting that will cause its collapse.
All the civilizations that predated ours collapsed at some point. I can't think that our current civilization will last forever. Things that worry me are things that don't seem to be concerning anyone else. For instance, all of the breakthrough scientific innovations that have created our late 20th Century efflorescence date back to the 1950s and 1960s (except for the PCR process, which is a pretty big deal). Fusion is still 20-30 years out. Quantum computing might happen in 10 or 15 years, but its use cases are somewhat limited. Space colonies are out of the question with our current technology. So the technical underpinnings of our civilization is basically running on fumes right now. Personally, I feel lucky to have lived with what will probably be viewed in the future as golden age. But I sort of wish I had had kids. I'd tell 'em not let the doomsters get them down. ;-)
The original TJ quote...
“There are indeed (who might say Nay) gloomy & hypochondriac minds, inhabitants of diseased bodies, disgusted with the present, & despairing of the future; always counting that the worst will happen, because it may happen. To these I say How much pain have cost us the evils which have never happened!”
—Thomas Jefferson, Letter to John Adams, Apr. 8, 1816
I appreciate your listing all the waves of catastrophizing. I lived through that same list and felt much the same about it at the time.
I come from an anxious line of people though we get calmer as we age. All the folks I know personally who are expressing doubts about having kids now are likewise anxious people. Society maybe needs us anxious-tending folks because our jumpiness acts as a kind of vigilant early warning system for the whole herd. But only to a point. We also wear ourselves out and many of the people around us.
Also in the early 2000s a lot of people spent a lot of time worrying that Al Qaeda would get its hands on nuclear or biological weapons and start destroying cities. Another danger that didn't quite go away, people just stopped talking and thinking about it and it stopped seeming like a problem.
> The Ozone Hole was going expand and all life would die under unfiltered UV radiation
> Then there was Y2K
There was likely also exaggeration here, not end-of-world scenario but in this cases massive effort was put into solving issue.
In case of freon there is enough of ongoing work and pressure that even China was recently forced to actually do something with its pollution - see https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-48353341 https://www.warpnews.org/human-progress/freon-emissions-have-decreased/ (not verified quality of sources, but in this case facts are mostly correctly reported)
Y2K if ignored would have very significant damage, though definitely not end-of-world and someone describing it in this way was uninformed or lying
We *think* Y2K could have done significant damage. We don't really know, though, do we? But corporations invested a huge amount of money in updating their systems (I know because I was part of the effort). Was that money well-spent? I remain neutral on this question.
I find all the predictions of New Amsterdam's demise to flooding especially funny given the value of that land, and the elevation of Amsterdam....
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/new-amsterdam-becomes-new-york
Thank you, I loved this comment.
To the indigenous, the end of the world *did* happen. And many of those issues have not been addressed yet. After all, the Ozone hole is still an issue for New Zealand and Australia for example (there are dayswhere you cant be in the sun for minutes without getting sunbburn). And we clearly lucked out on nuclear war.
I wonder if a lot of these people are still thinking under the old "population bomb" paradigm. IE, back in the '70's, there was this idea that the global population was increasing at such a rate that, if nothing were done about it, would eventually result in strained food supplies that would create famine, disease, war, and probably a few other terrible things along the way. These problems were headed off by increasing farm productivity via higher yielding crops, higher levels of capital investment, increasing globalization of food markets, etc. Now that sort of apocalyptic fear has simply been transferred from famine to climate change.
I think it was Arnold Kling (vastly underrated, btw) who speculated a while back that humans, having evolved as hunter gatherers, are probably wired for conservation, as over-harvesting plant and animal food sources could spell disaster for h-g tribes; akin to a farmer eating his seed-corn. In our modern industrial world, resources are not fixed in supply, the way they are for hunter-gatherers, and beyond that, what counts as a resource in the first place is dependent on human knowledge of how to make use of a given thing. As such, we're a lot less resource-constrained than many people tend to think. It's another example of humans living in a world that is very different from the one we evolved in, and may help explain a lot of the apocalyptic rhetoric we hear from environmentalists.
Thank you so much for writing this. It's beautifully argued and I'm sending it to friends and family who desperately need to hear it.
Aside: Could someone do a midwit meme where the dumb person is saying "moar babbies" and the midwit person has a thought bubble with a bunch of equations about lifetime carbon footprints and the smart person is saying "more babies"?
I did grad school in upstate NY and then moved to DC. That's like speedrunning the next few decades of climate change and increasing my personal average environmental temp by 6C in one weekend. (So far I'm OK in case you're worried about me.) If you look at what states are losing congress seats, it's always cold places like NY and OH. Who's gaining? Hurricane- and drought-prone hot states: AZ, FL, and TX. I would like someone to calculate average personal warming in the US just from voluntary personal migration.
Here is why I'm pretty sure that normal people don't base life decisions on climate expectations: Property values in hot states are <I>growing</I>. Nobody I've heard of says "I don't want a 30-year mortgage on a Gulf Coast house. In 30 years nobody is gonna want to live in the humid hurricane hellhole that this place will become." Actually I think people <I>should</I> reason like that. I've just never heard it. The real estate prices don't reflect any sign of it. So when people say they won't have kids because of climate change, I have a hard time taking that at face value.
Drive south 200 miles, get out of your car, welcome to the apocalypse of a 2C climate change. Miami has about a 10C higher average temperature than NYC. It's more complicated than that of course, global warming changes aren't primarily winter based, environments need time to adapt, etc. If people from NY want to stop moving south that is fine with me, ha ha. The climate sure isn't stopping them, it's attracting them.
Why should they reason like that? Over the next thirty years temperature might rise by as much as one degree, probably less.
As much as 1° F, not 1° C. ;-) The IPCC in the AR6 seem to hedging their bets and making less dire predictions than previous reports. Looking at actual temperature data we've been tracking close lowest RCP which means an increase in global temps of 1°-1.8°C by the end of the century. Not to say it will hold that course, though, but you all my opinion of the models...
https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6_WGI_Full_Report.pdf
There have been articles reporting on people moving to states explicitly due to climate mitigation scenarios. And naturally, insurance companies beginning to reone the prices for coastline property.
Though it may fall into the category of 'failing to believe that other people can possibly believe what they claim to believe', I think it's important to note the (fairly or not, right-wing coded) point that basically no-one on the left is interested in promoting small-family policy outside of the anglosphere, where arguably it would have the most effect. I know there is some reasoning that improving the status of women in the developing world would naturally lead to smaller family size, but I'm inclined to interpret this as a happy coincidence - if empowering women was likely to have the opposite environmental effect, progressives would still want to do it. (I'd agree)
This combined with the (again, mostly noted on the right) tendency towards offsetting fertility decreases with immigration rather than degrowth, and rather passionate defense of all things immigration related, makes it hard for me to ignore the possibility that there is a big element of motivated reasoning to justify for an already-made decision. (Ie. Not having kids, for the usual rich nation reasons)
I mean, isn't the left obsessed abour promoting small-family policy outside of the anglosphere? I remember say people complaining about rightist groups promoting abstinence only sex education in parts of Africa as opposed to distributing condoms and teaching people how to use it (see Catholicism) for population control purposes.
This topic is so frustrating for me and now I'm frustrated all over again by all the replies along the lines of "no one who really wants kids will let intellectual arguments like this stop them". On the margin it absolutely does! Personal anecdote: You wouldn't believe how on-the-fence Bee and I have been about having more babies. An argument like this could _easily_ make the difference (if we weren't already 100% on board with it). In fact, if anyone else has other arguments, lay them on us! :)
"Life in the First World will continue, with worse weather and maybe a weaker economy, but more or less the same as always."
Exactly, life will be slightly harder and will get harder until we reach an equilibrium or intervene to prevent further climate change. A slightly worse economy probably also means the cost of having a child increases even further into absurdity i.e people with children will burden *more* of the climate change induced costs even if the average person isn't effected much.
It's certainly not just climate change that makes people decided not to have children it's climate change plus the rising cost of home ownership, higher education, health care - all things that aren't going to get any cheaper when the economy gets a haircut due to climate change.
As far as comparing the present day to 100 or 200 years ago in the past, attitudes around child rearing and the relative effort are completely flipped. 100 years ago or even just ~60 plenty of rural families had kids because children were a necessary input to staying alive past the age of 60 (gets pretty hard to run a farm yourself at that age). The most altruistic thing you did was let one or two of our offspring inherit the farm.
Compare that to the modern day in first world countries, children are a net cost. You are responsible for raising them and making sure they can compete in the global economy. Since you are responsible for their future it makes sense to factor in the impact of climate change on the future economy.
""Life in the First World will continue, with worse weather and maybe a weaker economy, but more or less the same as always."
Exactly, life will be slightly harder and will get harder until we reach an equilibrium or intervene to prevent further climate change."
On the evidence so far, life will continue getting better. You might consider that the IPCC emission estimates assume continued economic growth.
Economic growth will continue globally but in western countries we might see the CoL increase faster than local economic growth and certainly faster than wage growth. If you have a child you have to just hope they are lucky enough to have aptitudes in one of the remaining prosperous careers.
Anything "might" happen, but I cannot see any basis for your "certainly faster than wage growth."
India has a worse economy than the United States. Does that mean it's costlier to raise a child in India than in the US, or that Indians can't afford to have as many children as Americans?
Certainly not, it is relative to COL. A slightly worse economy in my mind means that wages will be depressed faster than key cost of living metrics do. The US has a vested interest in keeping asset prices high more (Real estate, Pharma IP, etc.) than it has an interest in keeping wages high. Any country dependent on consistent economic growth will be hit harder than you would expect.
How much parents normally spend on children depends not only on price levels but on incomes: we can't give the cost of raising a child as a fixed value. And indeed, there seems to be no general rule that people in worse economies have fewer children, at least across countries; so it's not obvious that there should be such a correlation across generations in the same country.
Relative to cost of living, Indians are much poorer than Americans. International comparisons are routinely made in terms of purchasing power parity, which takes account of different costs of living in different countries.
Scott, this is the worst thing you have ever written. You are terrible at understanding why other people hold views that you do not. When people say that they are not having kids due to climate change, they're not saying that out of concern for the world. They are saying it out of concern for their kids.
Do you even have kids?
Section 1 was dedicated to arguing that the kids will be alright. Out of the three sections, it's the longest and has the most detail. Did you have a specific problem with one of his arguments?
He very intentionally cherry-picks the least concerning, and least meaningful, measures of the effects of climate change -- no one cares about minor increases in sea level, people care about the fish dying off, previously contained diseases running rampant, natural disasters, increasing food prices. He ignores the knock-on and non-linear effects of climate change -- effects do not and are not staying contained, and it is ridiculous to think that they will or are. And he massively understates how bad things already are -- hell, last year everything around my hometown burned down and I had to rig my home into an air purification system. Today me and my wife battled shortages of basic supplies, half-way around the world.
This is a paper-thin justification of something he already wanted to believe.
1+
Why do you expect rising food prices? Crop yields have continued to rise during the first century+ of warming. Doubling CO2 concentration, roughly the IPCC projection for the end of the century, increases the yield of most crops by about 30% and reduces their need for water.
What your argument comes down to is "the reasonably predictable and measurable negative effects of climate change are minor, but other things that I can imagine happening and you can't prove won't happen are huge."
Why would you expect climate change to on average make the world a worse place? The current climate wasn't designed for us, and humans currently prosper across a range of climates much larger than the projected change. At the high end of warming estimates, by the end of the century Minnesota might be nearly as warm as Iowa is now.
I think part of the answer is here in this that Black Cat says "last year everything around my hometown burned down and I had to rig my home into an air purification system."
If Black Cat is in California, the last couple of years of wildfires has really affected people in a profound way. I can imagine how arguments about it not being that bad would not be well received in those quarters.
Of all the unconvincing "this was totally caused by climate change" arguments, I find the one about wildfires to be one of the least convincing. Massive fires in California would still be a regular occurrence if the Earth were one degree cooler.
There wouldn't be as large a series of fires if there wasn't a drought which if not caused by climae chane is certainly exacerbating it.
Because of the existing drought issues in California which is getting worse (probably constrained by the fall storms coming in now).
Sea level rise is a "minor issue?" First I'm hearing about it. I suspect this is just the whack-a-mole effect.
"fish dying off,[vague, which fish] previously contained diseases running rampant,[example?] natural disasters,[vague] increasing food prices[actual falsifiable prediction, hasn't happened so far, little reason to assume it will considering carbon fertilization and Canada and Russia]"
Do you think nobody should have had kids before the advent of modern medicine/the industrial revolution/the enlightenment/whatever, out of concern for their kids? Or do you think that wildfires and shortages make life today worse than in those times? If the former, Scott explicitly says his arguments are not addressed to you. If the latter... I reckon you're just wrong.
> no one cares about minor increases in sea level
That is typically given as a primary problem, including by people who present global warming as massive problem.
It is not "no one cares about it", that is the standard argument!
Let us not forget that people had kids, sometimes many of them, in previous periods of gloom and doom, BUT they did so primarily for two reasons;
1. They needed those kids for their own well-being. No welfare system, no socialized health care, no pensions, no options for paid senior care. Only the the very wealthy had no worries about the types of situations that would require these social services, and they were thoroughly indoctrinated into need at least 'an heir and a spare'. Plus of course, if you're living on a family farm (as most did) or running a small family business (as many did, blacksmithing and such), you needed those kids' hands at work very early.
2. Since the industrial revolution, most people in 'developed' countries didn't have good info/access to even moderately reliable birth-control, so not having kids mostly meant not having sex. An option few will choose.
I also think that young adults these days (I have three of them in my house as we speak, eating leftovers from Canadian Thanksgiving, two my own offspring) see their own lives as much more precarious in many ways, not just because of climate change but in general. And they have absorbed the culture's beliefs about not having kids unless you can raise them well, and choosing a life for themselves that won't kill them with stress. If a young person believes that they will spend years, perhaps forever, in the gig economy, while trying to pay off the kind of student debt that will impede the purchase of that 'entry level' home, etc AND at the mercy of more frequent floods, storms, drought, fire, etc, I can easily imagine that having kids may not look that attractive. If they have no reason to believe that their children's lives will be any better than their own, and most likely quite a bit worse, less so still.
Thank you for this comment -- both for its levelheadedness and for writing it!
I find the spectacle of an overwhelmingly male commentariat arguing about what women should do with their lives to be singularly unedifying.
Come. Women tell *men* what to do with their lives every freaking moment of the day. Sauce for the goose, sauce for the gander. If you're waiting for a hypothetical future where the sexes do *not* lecture each other for their mutual "improvement" pretty much continuously, best send out for lunch, it will be a while. It might be that parents stop saying "kids these days!" and kids stop complaining about the ol' squares who Just Don't Understand sooner.
Whether to have children is 100% the woman's decision when convenient, and a 50-50 decision when it comes time to foot the bill, right gregvp?
"Since the industrial revolution, most people in 'developed' countries didn't have good info/access to even moderately reliable birth-control, so not having kids mostly meant not having sex. "
That was the heart of Malthus' argument, but it wasn't true, as he obliquely concedes in a few places. Coitus interruptus is an old technology, and although it is much less reliable than modern contraception it is still reliable enough to substantially reduce birth rates. Non-vaginal intercourse is entirely reliable. Those methods were known for centuries.
The rhythm method is less clear, since it isn't clear how many people when and where had the necessary information. It again isn't 100% reliable, but it doesn't have to be to produce four kids instead of eight.
We are discussing not having any kids at all, I believe. Less reliable methods can definitely reduce the number of kids,as could the very-risky methods of abortion at the time, but for a sexually active couple or woman, would be hard pressed to create none at all.
Beautifully spoken, thanks. These are my kids too, saying the same things. Also many of my patients in their 20s and 30s.
I can say with 100% certainty that the Earth's climate will not be anywhere close to the climate of Venus in my children's lifetime and my children's children's lifetime, and on and on for the next hundred generations. (At least.) For one, nothing we do as humans is going to stop plate tectonics and freeze the crust, leading to the eventual cessation of the Earth's magnetic field. Even if we're just talking about atmospheric carbon and the greenhouse effect, Venus is way more than one or two degrees hotter. It's hundreds of degrees. (440-ish if you use Celsius, and 800 or so for Fahrenheit.) And the air is over 96% carbon dioxide. Earth's is 0.04%, even with all we pump in to it. We'll get hotter here, but we will never be like Venus in the next few thousand (or million) years.
This is not how it works.
The runaway greenhouse effect, which brought Venus (it is believed) to its current state, is based around *water vapor*. Water vapor is a strong greenhouse gas, but most of Earth's surface water is liquid. If the temperature gets higher, there'll be more vapor in the atmosphere, strengthening the warming relative to CO2 alone. If the temperature gets high enough, every degree of temperature rise will cause enough evaporation to strengthen the water vapor greenhouse by a degree; at that point it's a feedback loop that gets you to 100 Celsius, and all of your surface water becomes vapor.
Over time, the water gets ionized and hydrogen escapes to space (because it's so light), bringing temperatures back down; Venus's current temperatures are the result of hundreds of millions to billions of years of volcanoes pumping CO2 into the atmosphere, without limestone deposition to remove it (as it does on Earth - CO2 enters the atmosphere from volcanoes and then exits it due to precipitating in the ocean). But since you have no oceans by that point, you kind of have other problems.
Is this going to happen due to fossil fuels? Almost certainly not, but that's the reason for Venus being mentioned.
> If the temperature gets high enough, every degree of temperature rise will cause enough evaporation to strengthen the water vapor greenhouse by a degree
This sounds like something fairly easy to model somewhat accurately, are you aware of anywhere that this turning point has been calculated?
Yes, on numerous occasions, all the way back to Ingersoll in 1969 (Leconte et al. 2013, 'Increased insolation threshold for runaway greenhouse processes on Earth-like planets' is the first recent reference I found). It's somewhere in the general vicinity of 60 Celsius.
So yes, there's a reason it's not an immediate concern.
Hmm. I'm skeptical. Looking of the mass of the hydrosphere, we find that if all of it were vapor the surface pressure would be ~260 atm, and a quick glance at the phase diagram of water says the surface temperature would need to be ~500C. Now, water is already a lot more chemically reactive than CO2, and that is before we heat it to exceedingly high temperatures, where it will react with a wide variety of minerals (which would remove it). I'm finding it hard to believe you could maintain a mantle of superhot water without it being pretty quickly removed by reaction with the surface. CO2 is another story, it is a very unreactive compound -- indeed, one of the few things to react effectively with it is water ha ha, and even then it only precipitates as carbonate rock because water *also* reacts vigorously with Group 1A and 2A metals and puts them in the ionized state where they can form precipitates with the carbonate ion.
That's also leaving aside the point that if it were possible to trigger a positive-feedback loop with water vapor by a mere 2-3C rise in temperature above the 20th century average, it would've already happened in the last interglacial or so.
All true and it doesn't change a thing about what I said. It would take millions or billions of years to change our atmosphere to be anything like that of Venus. There's no way that process you described (quite well) happens fast enough to make us Venus in our children's lifetime.
"if you don’t think your kid is going to make the world a better place in some way, why bother?"
I really like this blog. You can go whole articles appreciating the insight into matters great and small and then Scott throws something like this at you, like he just stepped off a saucer from Beta Reticuli. It's bracing, like
...a punch to the face that didn't quite break your nose.
Let's not forget the contribution of the sun to our climate. A lowering magnetic field leads to more cosmic rays reaching earth, and lower temperatures. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23328940.2020.1796243
It has always seemed weird to me to argue that one should avoid having kids as an act of mercy on them. After all, human life is (unfortunately) still so fragile that a miserable child can easily exercise the option to cease their own existence by suicide.
One might argue that it is still immoral to force them to experience the suffering necessary to motivate them to exercise this option. However, given the relatively small fraction of people who commit suicide in even the worst times and situation in history, it seems we are quite terrible at estimating the amount of suffering people are willing to endure before deciding it isn't worth it and should therefore be very cautious in that calculation.
For example, I believe I read a study once estimating that the suicide rate in a Nazi concentration camp was 25%. That's very high, of course, but that means 75% of people still preferred existence to suicide.
I wouldn't take much meaning from the suicide rate. We have extremely strong instincts against suicide, such that even if people prefer suicide to existence, very few will carry it out.
Perhaps, but I'm inclined to offer two responses. One is that our strong instincts against suicide are based on our strong "instinct" for enjoying existence. So, I feel this objection at least borders on question-begging.
Second, whatever issues there are with inference from "revealed preference", I'd say those issues are far less serious than predicting the actual preferences of a non-existent being.
I agree completely on your second point. To your first point, all you have to do is stand next to the edge of a cliff and feel how uncomfortable that makes you. The discomfort has nothing to do with an instinct of enjoying existence: it is just an instinctual aversion to danger.
It's not just instincts against suicide, it's social and religious pressure against it.
"After all, human life is (unfortunately) still so fragile that a miserable child can easily exercise the option to cease their own existence by suicide."
Perhaps you should read that sentence again and think how differently the world would be if it was easy.
Maybe I'm being dumb, but I'm not getting your meaning here?
Suicide is not easy. Very few of the overall miserable people end up doing it.
You wrote, "The IPCC predicts sea levels will probably rise another half a meter to a meter by 2100".
The linked page says instead, "In its 2019 report, the IPCC projected (chart above) 0.6 to 1.1 meters (1 to 3 feet) of global sea level rise by 2100 (or about 15 millimeters per year) if greenhouse gas emissions remain at high rates (RCP8.5)."
The page THEY link to says instead that RCP8.5 is the most-extreme scenario of RISING emissions, not of emissions continuing as at present.
So the IPCC doesn't predict that sea levels will probably rise another half a meter to a meter. RCP8.5 is an unlikely scenario. The consensus median sea rise by 2100, when I checked about 2 years ago, was about one foot. The only findings since then that I'm aware of would lower that to maybe 8 inches, but that's a guess with high variance, since the findings involved local effects such as the circulation of water underneath ice shelves, rather than global effects.
This is yet another example of climate change claims getting exaggerated with every repetition. All it takes to do that is to let one or two qualifying words slip past which indicate that the result being presented is not the expected result.
I can't help but note that we wouldn't even be talking about this if not for the anti-nuclear campaigns of the 20th century, and that nuclear power is STILL the obvious and only practical solution.
I should qualify that:
- We would still be having this conversation even if Western nations had gone nuclear, because most of the warming so far is due to burning wood in underdeveloped nations.
- Nuclear energy is the answer for the Western democracies. But I don't yet trust Russia, China, or India to develop safe nuclear power plants.
Russia IS the biggest nuclear power plant builder and exporter in the world right now, and it probably has more competence in this matter than Western democraties, simply because the latter haven't been building much nuclear lately at all. There are Russian-built nuclear reactors in Western democracies too (at least in Finland, where a new nuclear power plant also by Russia is being planned). Russia also still builds and operates e. g. nuclear-powered icebreakers, which no other country in the world does.
My perception is that the nuclear program is still going rather strong in Russia (despite it being a poor country, which probably could spend these money on more useful things) largely for the same reason as the space program: it is an area where the USSR was genuinely successful and now a prominent remnant of the gone "golden age", which helps somewhat to keep the country's prestige internally. Russia of course does not care about climate change, and is also proudly building new coal power plants.
Interesting! Do you know what kind of reactors they build? For instance, do they build any Generation IV reactors ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor )?
Apparently https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VVER#VVER-1200 is the model being most widely built at the moment, also planned for that upcoming Finnish project (Hanhikivi). As for Generation IV, an experimental https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BREST_(reactor) is being built and a production https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BN-1200_reactor is being planned.
The latest IPCC report finally admitted a bit more clearly that RCP8.5 wasn't a likely outcome. What is often missed is that of course all RCP outcomes start at today's trajectories and then diverge in the following decades. Some rather disingenuous reporting uses that to infer RCP8.5 is the expected outcome if "nothing changes".
Even with RCP8.5 sea level rise had a range whose median outcome was ~2 feet and max was 3 feet. So the media continuously reported the worst case of the range for the worst case RCP trajectory as nominal. A few years ago the NOAA did something called an extreme scenario where ice sheets were assumed to disintegrate and so forth where they got to 2M of sea level rise. This number started showing up in the media on a regular basis. This would require what are pretty stable sea level rise rates to increase 10X, starting tomorrow. It's batty and doesn't even pass a minimal sanity check.
The choice is viewed through a very western lens, with the benefits basically: would I value having kids and a relationship with them? Instead of: do I value having brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, cousins, grandparents, an actual extended family? And if you do value that, then your children aren't just valuable to yourself: they are valuable to others in your family. The extended family cannot exist without more kids.
It is common to hear people complain about their family pressuring them to have kids, with the sentiment that it is none of their business. But you aren't just having kids for yourself: you're having them for the whole family.
Or at least, you would be if you weren't living an extremely independent western lifestyle where families are separated by hundreds or thousands of miles, and increasingly wide generational gaps, and mostly don't interact. As it stands, you aren't helping to bolster an extended family and support network by having kids. You are creating an autonomous worker drone who will struggle to create meaningful relationships in an age of serial monogamy, and find most of their self-worth creating shareholder value and curating their instagram through tasteful consumer choices.
Ouch. This one is too close to home.
Scott's political argument may be good rhetoric for persuading the particular people he wants to persuade, but it is a bad argument. Nordhaus, arguing for the importance of acting against climate change, estimated the global net cost of doing nothing for fifty years instead of taking the optimal policies immediately as $4.1 trillion. Congress at the moment is considering two pieces of legislation whose combined cost is more than that.
The scale of expenditure considered in one political controversy in one year should make it obvious that the amount at stake in political decisions in the US over the next century is much more than the amount at stake globally, at least according to an expert estimate from someone trying to make the amount look large, on climate policy.
The only defensible sense I can make of the argument is it is of the form:
1. Climate change isn't a catastrophe that should make you choose not to have kids.
2. But if you believe it is, then you should have kids so that there will be more voters trying to stop it.
Re: Slim majorities and the median voter theorem, here's a halfway-rigorous way of thinking about this in the context of political parties:
Imagine an iterated 2-player game where two political parties compete to guide the country in different directions. There is an N-dimensional space of all possible policies the country could enact, and each party has a (different) desired point within that space, and wants to get as close as possible to their goal point.
In each round, each party chooses a platform, which is any point they like within the overall policy-space. Then, all voters support whichever platform is closer to that voter's personal preferences, and the country moves in the direction of that platform.
Parties are incentivized to win the election, but also incentivized to choose platforms closer to their goal point. If you use your true goal point as your platform, you'll lose the election, and won't move. If you just copy voters' popular preferences, it becomes easier to win votes, but you still don't move anywhere. You want to maximize (probability of winning) * (distance towards your goal if you win).
In the perfect-information version of this game, both parties will pick platforms that closely follow popular opinions (the "median" voter, or some N-dimensional analog), because if they don't, then the other party will win by getting closer. You need to take the smallest possible steps towards your goal, because whoever tries to move faster will lose.
But now suppose that parties have only imperfect information about voters, voters' preferences change between rounds. Now, moving faster isn't ALWAYS punished, because your opponent doesn't have enough information to reliably capitalize on your mistake; sometimes you win anyway, and your bolder platform means you get a bigger win than if you'd been cautious.
The more uncertainty, the more the two parties will start to pull apart from each other, as the occasional big wins make up for winning less often.
But if both players are approximately equally good at the game, you still expect them to split the vote pretty close to 50/50. For both players, the ideal outcome is to be just-moderate-enough that you can win 51% of the vote, while making as much progress as possible towards your goal-point.
(Note that "the vote" in question here is whatever is actually used to determine the winner. In US presidential elections, that means I'm predicting they approximately-evenly-split the electoral college, not the popular vote.)
If the voters' preferences suddenly move in one direction, then in the short term, one party will start getting more votes--because both parties were blindsided. But once the parties figure out what happened, we expect both parties to move in the same direction as voters' preferences, until they are once again splitting the vote approximately evenly.
In other words: the majority will ALWAYS be razor-thin. Changes in overall voter preferences will move both parties, instead of changing the margin of victory.
Of course, this conclusion is only as sound as the model it was based on.
Illuminating, many thanks!
This is a great explanation of why elections are always so close.
... though I think it doesn't fundamentally change the conclusion of this article, just the mechanism. Instead of having 5% more "children of climate concerned parents" flipping the election from Republican to Democrat, it just means that, in this model, both the Republicans and Democrats will move more towards caring about the environment, regardless of the outcome of the election.
The conclusion is similar in that changing demographics still cause movement, but it differs in that the movement is gradual, rather than an abrupt turning-point where you flip from one party to another.
(Also, it gets more complicated when you factor in stuff like electoral colleges.)
The way I think about it is even simpler: political parties are playing a game of reverse Blackjack. The goal is to get to 51% of the vote (or equivalent, like Electoral College votes), then spend your remaining 'policy slots' on the policies you yourself actually want, without going beneath 51.
Getting more than 51% is like stopping below 21 in Blackjack: safer than going under 51/over 21, but not as rewarding as getting closer to the magic number: getting 60% of the vote is nice, but not as nice as getting to do what you want, especially since you still get 100% of the Presidency with only 51% of the (Electoral College) votes. Thus, everyone tries to go for 51% (or therabouts), not too much higher or lower.
"One way to think of this is to notice that we’ve already gotten about 25-30% of the global warming we’re likely to see by 2100."
Your graph starts in 1950. Warming starts about 1909. From then to 1950, global temperature goes up by about .29°C. From 1950 to 2019, the last year in the NASA table I'm using, another 1 degree. So your 25-30% should be 32-39%.
(Data from https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/tabledata_v3/GLB.Ts+dSST.txt)
Good arguments but you missed what is IMO the strongest one, economic growth.
If global GDP per capita continues to grow at about 2% per year, your grandchildren will be about 4 times richer than you. Climate change could be much more costly than the IPCC says and it would just mean that your grandkids are 3 times richer than you instead of 4 times.
"if you want kids at all you have to believe they’re going to add something to the world, right? Maybe it’ll be as a climate change activist or environmental scientist, maybe it will be in some totally different field, but if you don’t think your kid is going to make the world a better place in some way, why bother?"
I strongly disagree with this sentiment. I do not have children (yet), but if I decide have any in the future, it will not be for their utilitarian value in making the world a better place. That could be a nice bonus, but it would not at all be required. In fact, I suspect that from a pure EA perspective, using my time and energy to make a family will be highly inefficient.
The only thing I would want for my kids is for them to enjoy their lives. As long as they have that, I'll be happy. Even if they turn out to never help another person in any capacity, never get a job, and contribute nothing to anything.
People don't want to have children for personal (not quite altruistic) reasons (basically to party until they're 50 or focus on their career and so on), and put forward the "climate change" BS as a noble justification.
Scott,
0. I am in qualified agreement with the plea. Climate change, or rather the looming environmental crisis for which it is a shorthand,* should not in itself be a reason for this decision.
My moreal position is that taking the top few steps implied by your "much more than you wanted to know about carbon emissions" post (move to a high-density city, or failing that, next door to work; ride a bicycle, never a car; take no more than ten plane rides in your life; go vegetarian) more than compensates.
However: -
1. This essay amounts to telling women what to do with their lives, and the comments are mostly worse in that regard, as well as in their content because the overwhelming majority of commenters present as male.
2. This essay does not read like one of yours. I expect you to reveal at some point that it was a guest post by a woman.
3. The essay utterly fails to address the moral argument. Morals are not about what other people do: they are not a co-ordination problem. Talk about percentages of voters is utterly irrelevant.
Climate attribution has solidified over the last few years. We know that there will be millions of climate-attributed excess deaths from storms and droughts over the remainder of the century. The question is, to what degree do you want to contribute to them?
4. Focusing on sea level rise is seriously strawmanning climate change concerns.
Economists do that, because they are drunks who can only look for their keys under the streetlight. Not all of them, though: In "Climate Shock", Wagner and Weitzman plead with their fellows to consider the implications of fat-tailed pdfs of climate harm.
Focussing on sea level rise *in developed countries primarily* is strawmanning the strawman. Therefore this section reads like "don't worry your pretty head about it". This essay really *had* better be written by a woman.
5. Unlike moral belief, carbon capture and sequestration technology *does* suffer from a co-ordination problem: it will ony endure and grow if it is mandated by governments.
* William Gibson coined the term "the jackpot" for this multi-system capacity exhaustion and degradation. It's a pity some term like this hasn't taken off.
> 1. This essay amounts to telling women what to do with their lives, and the comments are mostly worse in that regard, as well as in their content because the overwhelming majority of commenters present as male.
This is wrong on multiple accounts. First, and most critically, the whole essay is in answer to someone who's reason for not having children is because of climate change. Everyone coming to the comments to argue that there are other reasons to not have children is missing the point.
Second, the implied idea in your comment seems to be that women are the only ones who have any business over deciding whether to have children, and so any advice regarding whether or not to have children is "telling a woman what to do with their lives". ... despite that having children is a *joint* decision between a couple in the vast majority of cases.
There are absolutely men who are apprehensive about having children in an era of climate change and this article is just as applicable to them as it is to women.
> 2. This essay does not read like one of yours. I expect you to reveal at some point that it was a guest post by a woman.
I have no idea why you think this isn't Scott, or what to make of the fact that you seem to think this essay (which you seem to almost entirely disagree with) must have been secretly written by a woman. ... which seems weirdly sexist in light of your previous complaint.
> which seems weirdly sexist in light of your previous complaint.
especially
> Therefore this section reads like "don't worry your pretty head about it". This essay really *had* better be written by a woman.
I'm one of the small-ish number of women subscribers and regular readers here and whatever weaknesses strike me about Scott's argument (have babies so they'll vote Democrat!), I do not hear him telling women what to do with their lives, nor do I hear the commenters at large doing that. I'm interested in where you hear that.
I have an extremely sensitive button around men telling women what to do with their lives, so it surprises me to see someone have that switch flipped without mine also being flipped.
> This essay amounts to telling women what to do with their lives
actually entire point of this essay is arguing that people deciding to have children[1] should ignore one of external voices telling them what to do with their lives
[1]not only women! There are cases where women alone decides about it but it is not dominant at all
Even if the worst case scenario of climate change happens, nature will eventually be fine. Nature survived the great oxidation event, so there's no realistic world in which global warming destroys the biosphere.
So the only possible reason to care about climate change at all is because of how it will affect people in the future. And not having future people exist is a self-defeating way of helping them.
Besides, solving this requires human creativity, effort and wealth. The more of these we have, the more we can spend on climate change. The fewer people we have, the less creativity and wealth we'll have, and the harder it will be to actually make things better. Really the best thing you can do for the planet is have more kids.
This phenomenon is real lesson in unintended consequences. Decades of over-moralizing and catastrophizing about a problem has bred a whole new moral panic about the existence of humans. Given how many people say having kids is the best/most meaningful part of their lives, the net effect of climate activism might turn out to be hugely negative for humanity..
The more people who are bred, the more resources are consumed which makes climate change worse. It is not a guarantee that more people will magically mean more creativity and wealth. After all, in the aftermath of the Black Death, there was mor wealth, at least per capita for the working classses of Europe.
In the middle ages, the vast majority of wealth was in farmland. The basis of the feudal economy was controlling land, and peasants to work the land were (economically) interchangeable. The richest lords were those with the most land. Valuable capital was already there, rather than created. That's why conquest was more profitable than investing.
Today, the economy is based on knowledge. The most valuable companies in the world, implying Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Tencent, etc. get their value from knowledge. Knowledge workers are in short supply. Founders and investors in knowledge companies are the richest people in the world.
Even if you consider capital to be more important than labor in creating wealth, the most productive capital is generally not farmland or mines. It's factories and data centers, which have to be invented and built by creative people.
Real estate is valuable and often a good investment, but it's not productive. It only increases in value because of increased demand and constrained supply. It doesn't create new wealth.
If 1/3 of people died, like the black death, survivors might end up with more real estate wealth, but less new capital would be created. With less new capital and fewer people, we really would lose a lot of economic and creative capability. The world is different today from the middle ages.
> It’s hard to tell how many people have died of climate-change-related causes. Maybe thousands? Maybe tens of thousands?
I get the intent of this post, but really, this is really under-playing it. Just to name one thing: the events ultimately leading to the Syrian civil war involved, among other things, the drought of 2006-2009, which had an unprecedented severity because of anthropogenic climate change:
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/03/science/earth/study-links-syria-conflict-to-drought-caused-by-climate-change.html
The Syrian civil war, to date, has caused 350.000 casualties:
https://www.google.com/search?q=syrian+civil+war+casualties
This does not seem an unreasonably long chain of events to blame a significant percentage of these casualties on climate change; hunger has always been a powerful force for change in societies.
Then we have the geopolitical ramifications of the Syrian civil war and its refugees. Their movements to safety are having long-lasting effects on all of Europe, causing significant debate and strengthening of right-wing parties, parties which just so happen to be on the far side of the climate change denier spectrum.
And that's just one case, one place, a few years: a significant percentage of 350.000 dead, millions displaced.
If you put an almost comically stereotypical focus on the USA, yes, you can buy your way out of much of this. No climate refugees are going to come your way by virtue of geography, sparing you the political ramifications. The world will continue to sell their grain even if their own population may be starving, as long as you offer enough money or technology.
But we're all in this together, and insinuating that the cost of climate change, measured in human lives, is maybe 5 digits, 6 tops, is the sort of disingenious attitude that I'm not used to reading here.
GDP per capita increased during the years of the drought.
Not sure what you are getting at here. Syria should never have gone to civil war because everything (or at least GDP) was fine and dandy per capita? It was all a big misunderstanding because the peasants failed to understand basic economics? Millions fled the countryside to the cities because of the drought, increasing social tensions, which culminated in the civil war. I guess they should just have eaten their allotted GDP, the silly peasants.
If you are trying to make a point, please do spell it out for me. I sincerely hope I misunderstood you as saying "let them eat cake".
"Millions fled the countryside to the cities because of the drought, increasing social tensions"
I'm doubting that that went through the formality of actually happening, and would like to see more evidence. "The war happened" is just circular reasoning and doesn't count as evidence. It's possible that a fraction of the people got poorer as others got much richer, it's also possible that most got gradually richer over time, as has happened in most countries.
Admittedly, the debate about the link between climate change and conflict is ongoing, in general and Syria in particular, and the number of 1.5 million internal migrants before the war, as can be found in news articles, is most likely overblown, though not totally without basis:
https://scholar.google.de/scholar?q=syrian+civil+war+climate+change
A rather recent study finds and provides a theoretical basis for a connection between "Climatic Stress, Internal Migration, and Syrian Civil War Onset":
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0022002719864140
From the abstract:
> [..] Our findings support the internal migration hypothesis and suggest extreme climate events may impact civil unrest via geographically and temporally indirect paths.
Also, the papers that disagreed with the climate change/internal migration/unrest connection still emphasize the political and socio-economic causes for the civil war, meaning that "GDP per capita was growing before the war" is still without meaning, because people profitted unequally. Assad has attempted China-style economic liberalization, apparently leading to greater economic inequality and thus unrest, on top of the political tensions. Climate change probably has been a contributing factor in an already tense situation, which is what I was getting at in my first comment.
And so my overall point still stands: If climate change is only 1% responsible for the Syrian civil war, then that's already the "thousands" quota thrown in the ring by Scott, and can only get worse from there.
> And so my overall point still stands: If climate change is only 1% responsible for the Syrian civil war, then that's already the "thousands" quota thrown in the ring by Scott, and can only get worse from there.
1% still sounds like an overestimate.
Besides, if we are to accept this extremely tenuous link then we must also offset all the other wars which have been _prevented_ by climate change.
Which wars? I don't know. But if we were able to peep into the universe where everything else is held constant but the effect of anthropogenic climate change is magically removed, then I would contend that the probability that this alternative universe doesn't have a Syrian Civil War is approximately equal to the probability that this universe has an extra war somewhere else.
>1% still sounds like an overestimate.
On what basis? One study I linked found that the sever drought at the time was a contributing factor for the unrest that culminated in the Syrian civil war. Surely they would not make such a statement if they didn't find a sufficiently strong signal in their statistical analysis. And we know that climate change will, among others, result in climate stress such as droughts. It's certainly plausible that we have such a connection here.
So if the drought has contributed a percentage x to the outbreak of the war, and climate change has made the drought more likely by a factor of n, then climate change has contributed x - x/n to the outbreak of the war.
For example, let x equal 10% so that the authors of the study can confidently say that the drought has contributed. Let's further say that climate change increases the chance of drought by a factor of 1.1, or a 10% increase. That would mean climate change has contributed 10 - 10/1.1 ~ 0.9% to the war outcomes.
>then I would contend that the probability that this alternative universe doesn't have a Syrian Civil War is approximately equal to the probability that this universe has an extra war somewhere else.
Guess it's my turn to ask for more evidence. I provided at least some. Can you too?
I'm skeptical of this, both because I think the drought was only a small contributor to the civil war (lots of Arab countries were having protests and civil wars around this time) and because I think climate change was only a partial contributor to the drought (I don't know anything about Middle Eastern droughts, but I've been following the US hurricane research and it looks like climate change has had a vague small gestalt effect that can't clearly be blamed for any individual hurricane).
I suspect that in the next few years, every political disturbance in the Third World will be blamed on climate change - and also, that when you add it up, there won't be any more political disturbances in the Third World than in previous decades (or than the trend from previous decades would have predicted).
If you had to put a number on it, how large would you estimate the effect of climate change on Syria, to pick an example? Is 1% too much? Too little? From the articles I've skimmed here:
https://scholar.google.de/scholar?q=syrian+civil+war+climate+change
the point that the Syrian drought around 2006-2009 was the worst on record is not disputed.
As I am discussing with another commentator, the influence of climactic stress (not necessarily caused by climate change) on conflict in general and Syria in particular is still under debate. I'm not remotely qualified to weigh in, but there certainly are arguments in favor, for example
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0022002719864140
Surely, if the authors feel sufficiently confident to state in a paper that they have found a signal in the real, messy world of people and economy and politics, it had better be more than 1% above noise. Again, lot of debate around that.
One says two to three times as likely, meaning climate change would be responsible for .5% to .67% of the Syrian civil war and its outcomes:
https://www.pnas.org/content/112/11/3241
while a response to that paper finds no connection and shares your view that policy makers, news outlets etc. should be more cautious with such claims:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0962629816301822
As you've already said yourself, climate change is going to be very bad for the world, i.e. the bad outcomes will greatly outweigh the good. Somehow this net badness has to manifest itself, for example through weather extremes such as floods or droughts. So if droughts and climate in general can contribute to "political disturbances", and climate changes causes more of those, then surely climate change will be measurably responsible for those outcomes. And again, even small percentages matter when we are talking about millions of refugees and hundreds of thousands dead over a certain time frame.
> I suspect that in the next few years, every political disturbance in the Third World will be blamed on climate change - and also, that when you add it up, there won't be any more political disturbances in the Third World than in previous decades (or than the trend from previous decades would have predicted).
On the very first comment in this thread you called out ramparen on their usage of "no one" in their comment. Is it safe to assume that you hold yourself to the same standard when you say "every" and "won't be any more" political disturbances? In other words, are we going to see a line or two about this in the next yearly predictions post?
How many wars, insurrections, etc, did the climate change we've had so far *prevent*? If you're going to count the Syrian Civil War, even at the 1% level, you have to count those too. And at this level, we are talking about small perturbations that a priori are about as likely to go one way as another.
If climate change is a net negative for the world, then the conflict and general suffering it has prevented surely must count for less than it has caused, or not?
First off, "if", so facts not in evidence. Second, it is possible for climate change to be a net negative and yet cause less conflict. Even less suffering, though that's a bit more of a stretch. Still, if the result of climate change is 10% less suffering, and 30% less joy, that's a net negative.
> First off, "if", so facts not in evidence.
Is it really still a point of contention that climate change is going to be a net negative? Scott himself seems to believe so ("In conclusion, climate change will probably be very bad for the world"), not to mention the vast majority of climate scientists.
Only Syria, Libya and perhaps Iraq had a civil war from Arab Spring. And Libya was already a desert, with foreign intervention exacerbating that. Iraq was partially an outgrowth of Syria's civil war, alongside the American invasion wrecking the country years before. Syria wasnt subject to those same sorts of things.
A good follow up post to this one would be on the risks to civilization posed by low-fertility rates.
For instance, what happens if we reach a point in which there aren't enough high-skilled people in the world to keep all of our technology working?
There are lots of reasons to not have a child. The main reason is if you really don't want one because it will ruin your lifestyle. In that case, please please do not have a child. But for those people who are concerned about the future, you are exactly the people who SHOULD have children. Because you are concerned about the future you most likely will be a good parent and thus raise a decent and valuable human being that can contribute to the world.
The average American makes over $1 million in their lifetime. Even if your carbon offset estimate is off by an order of magnitude, their value easily covers the carbon. If you care about the world, have kids.
Thanks for writing this. I consider myself to be somewhat in the camp of avoiding children due to climate concerns, but this was never about the issues in the post. I'm concerned about the emotional burden placed upon my children from living in the future world. This in turn has led me to examine the moral implications of bringing children into the world largely against there will. Anyway, these days the reluctance is far more about the uncertain political future and health care future exacerbated by the pandemic, and no longer about climate. This could be read as just making excuses for my behavior, but if my behavior is something I want to be doing anyway, I don't think it matters my excuse. Well, to me it wouldn't but all the pressure from society kind of demands you have these types of excuses at the ready.
The worst possible thing that could happen as a result of runaway global warming is a replay of Earth's worst mass extinction ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian%E2%80%93Triassic_extinction_event ), which happened when the largest known volcanic eruption ever ended up causing, among other problems, the release of trillions of tons of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, which messed up ocean circulation between the surface and the depths, which caused there to be less oxygen and allowed anerobic bacteria to grow that produced toxic hydrogen sulfide gas. Various positive feedbacks then made the oxygen-depleted regions larger and larger until the bacteria were making enough hydrogen sulfide to make the entire atmosphere unbreatheable and to destroy the ozone layer exposing the surface to potentally lethal levels of UV radiation. So, yeah, end-of-the-world type stuff.
Fortunately this kind of disaster would probably require warming the Earth by at least *ten* degrees Celcius, which is significantly more than even the most pessimistic scenarios project and the feedbacks take thousands of years to get to the point where hydrogen sulfide comes out of the ocean and kills everything. So it's not exactly a realistic scenario, but it is *possible* to kill the planet with enough carbon dioxide.
See also: https://books.google.com/books/about/Under_a_Green_Sky.html?id=wWiKJF1aXyYC&source=kp_book_description
I'm an older (48) reader with two young kids (3.75 and 11 months). I'm extremely pro-natalist, yet my wife and I have already decided that we will likely stop at the 2 since we live in NYC and I'm old. That said, I've heard this exact anti-child sentiment from my 20-something cousins (my mother comes from a family of 8, with her being the oldest, so I have cousins that range from 40's to pre-teens).
Here are my quick takes on why well-off educated people should opt to have families:
1) If you enjoy the fairly liberal, largely secural society you live in, have kids that will be future voters who will help protect that society and its values. If you don't, you will be outbred by religious orthodoxy and you will eventually have a much less tolerant society.
2) Any likely solution to climate change (proactive technological solution, since cutting back is no longer going to do enough to stem the current heating up loop) will originate among the educated elite and their children. I'm decently smart, yet my daughter knows 50x what I knew at 3.75 years. She can basically read, while I learned to read in kindergarten. She understands and can sometimes control her emotions, I had no basic emotional control until post-high school.
3) Having kids and attempting to raise them well has been the most important and most challenging endeavor of my life. I'm not sure I would consider the person I was before having kids to have been fully human. I'm not saying there aren't good reasons for SOME people to not have kids, but the person I was before having kids was 10x more selfish than the person I am now. And I don't have to think about it - innate biology kicks in. I have more energy and purpose than at any other time in my life.
4) Civilization is hard. Civilizations that bequeath gifts of technology, beauty, and progress to humanity are rare and should be celebrated, defended, and cherished. If you are an American, your kids will likely grow up with more wealth and opportunity than humanity has thus far experienced.
As far as I can tell, 1) actually applies to people with any ideology, assuming that children are likely to have similar views to their parents.
Thanks for writing, and taking up a hot topic. I agree with the conclusion, but respectfully disagree with the framing and the justifications.
The thesis statement to me feels both narrow (relegating the vast majority of the world to collateral damage) and incorrect (missing the point):
"Life in the First World will continue, with worse weather and maybe a weaker economy, but more or less the same as always."
I wish I shared that sentiment, but I think you wildly underestimate the relationship between society/politics and climate. Very few people are arguing that climate alone will be the issue. It's not the fact of sea-rise, it's the mass displacement and associated societal pressures (the refugees resulting from one civil war in Syria, at least in part related to natural resource access, practically broke Europe). It's the way the climate crisis interacts with -- and drives -- the other elements of the polycrisis (rising authoritarianism, runaway inequality, racialized violence, etc.)
The people (myself included) weighing the ethics of having children are not worried primarily about the prospects for "my white male son with an American passport, intergenerational wealth, and legacy admissions at an Ivy"... they're worried about "do I want to bring kids into the kind of world where those are the preconditions to anything resembling a decent life?"
The mindset that gives rise to the inquiry in the first place I suspect is tied to a concern with justice, with fairness, with dignity... and not only for our narrowly-defined biological children. The question is one of: what is the best way to live in the world to mitigate the climate crisis, and in that context should I have children? By framing the second question in narrow technical terms, I fear you miss the ethic of care and concern that gives rise to the first.
> they're worried about "do I want to bring kids into the kind of world where those are the preconditions to anything resembling a decent life?"
If you _do_ think that these are going to be the preconditions for having a decent life, then it seems like the most moral thing to do is to maximise the number of people who are born into those conditions.
If we do the Rawl veil of ignorance thing, then if I'm going to be born as a random person in the next generation then by golly I would like to ensure that the number of people born into rich White American families is maximised and the number of people born into poverty in Syria or Nigeria is minimised.
I think the idea is supposed to be that "giving up" having children is supposed to be some kind of "statement" that signals one's ideological opposition to the system that supposedly benefits people like him. It's an easy way to send this signal for people who don't want to have children anyway, much easier than parting with said "generational wealth," after all, it's not like there are any institutions that exist one can donate that money too to support the poorer among us.
The mid range estimate of GDP growth by 2100 is 450%, including developing countries closing the gap and thereby individually growing at a faster rate than the total. There's basically no amount of climate cost that will actually tend to worsen life overall
For instance it is predicted that hurricanes may get somewhat less frequent as the temperature gradient from the arctic to the tropics reduces (negative feedback of clouds in the tropics substantially reduces warming there). However with higher temperatures the hurricanes should be higher energy, resulting in an estimate of a warming caused doubling of hurricane costs
Crucially however, this means that the cost of GDP projection is that rather than drop to a quarter, hurricane costs will drop to half of their current GDP fractional cost as the economy grows. In doing so deaths are likely to decrease absolutely as people with better economies are substantially better prepared to deal with disasters
Brian,
You seem convinced that there is some kind of "polycrisis". Yet when I look at the factors you cite I see general improving trends.
War is less common now than before, not more common
Incomes are 10x higher globally, and estimated by the IPCC to rising another 4x (thus 40x long term) by centuries end with climate change
Lifespan is double globally.
Freedom, democracy (not authoritarianism), equality of opportunity, education and so on are incomparably better than even a few generations ago.
Global inequality has been declining rapidly over the past generation (this assumes inequality is even problem as opposed to unfairness). Either way the world is getting less unequal and more fair by just about any measure.
Racism and racialized violence are orders of magnitude less severe than a few generations ago. Again, humans have never lived in a time with so little of this human folly.
Could you please explain how the world today is more unjust or how we have less dignity or opportunity or freedom than we did in prior generations? Seriously. When is this golden era to which you compare the problems of today to?
Could you try to enlighten those of us scratching our heads and wondering what you are talking about? I promise to keep an open mind.
My benchmark is a just world, not any point in the past. I think the picture is complicated, at best. I like Tom Atlee's line:
"Things are getting better and better and worse and worse, faster and faster, simultaneously."
I think trend lines are most relevant forward-looking: are we getting closer to a just world, or farther away? While there are certainly some positive trends in limited spheres (global health, perhaps), the macro trends are all moving in the wrong direction (climate, inequality, economic stability, racialized violence, authoritarianism, etc).
It's a long read, but the best overall picture on the macroeconomic context I've found is from Wolfgang Streeck, eerily prescient writing in 2014 (anticipating the rise of Trumps, Johnsons, Bolsonaros, etc). Here's a teaser:
"The capitalist system is at present stricken with at least five worsening disorders for which no cure is at hand: declining growth, oligarchy, starvation of the public sphere, corruption and international anarchy. What is to be expected, on the basis of capitalism’s recent historical record, is a long and painful period of cumulative decay: of intensifying frictions, of fragility and uncertainty, and of a steady succession of ‘normal accidents’—not necessarily but quite possibly on the scale of the global breakdown of the 1930s." (https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii87/articles/wolfgang-streeck-how-will-capitalism-end)
I think he more than adequately supports his arguments with compelling data - if you see it differently, i'm curious. And I think the intervening 7 years has validated his central thesis, and I don't see any serious prospects for change within the status quo (I do, however, hold out hope for transnational social movements anchored in a vision of justice and a world where everyone belongs).
Jason Hickel also does a good job debunking the "progress narrative" of Gates/Pinker et al, here if you're interested: https://newint.org/features/2019/07/01/long-read-progress-and-its-discontents
Well good luck on that perfectly just world.
I do agree that some things are getting better, and some things worse, and some of the things that are getting worse are negative side effects of those things we have improved
I already provided a disagreement to your suggestion of some of the trends running in a counter direction. I think anyone who thinks there is more violence, more racism, more poverty, less freedom, more authoritarianism, more war, or less opportunity than in prior generations is very mistaken. Please provide longer range stats if you really believe this though.
I kind of agree with some of the first article, but roll my eyes at the way it is spun as a critique of capitalism, when it is better viewed as a critique of the corruption and decay of Western Liberal institutions in total. I do agree that institutions tend to ossify and decay over time, and this is happening now around us. (A negative trend).
Hickel's article is much worse though. He starts by distorting what the optimists have written, especially by reducing their narrative to an extended argument for Washington Consensus Neoliberalism. Have you or Hickel even read Pinker? In his two books on the subject, capitalism is at most a very minor part of his explanation. Certainly every expert which I have read on the topic agrees that prosperity involves large decentralized markets of specialization and exchange, of some type or another. There have been various versions of this theme though from Finland to China to Singapore.
Hickel then grudgingly shifts to an argument that poverty may have been reduced but not as much as he would have liked in a perfect world. The optimists argument is actually completely in agreement with this summary. The argument isn’t that it is sufficient, so "YAY Capitalism". Their argument is that over the last two hundred years after ten thousand years of zero progress we have finally started to make gains, and the gains are coming at an increasingly fast pace each generation. The explanation is much, much broader than just free markets though, and specifically includes Enlightenment values, science, technology, energy, rule of law, liberal democracy, modern states, and social welfare functions.
The optimists argument then shifts to the rational conclusion that continued imperfect progress requires first acknowledging what has and has not worked, and then carefully building upon that knowledge.
I appreciate the invitation to dialogue; I spend most of my time in communities that already take for granted that we are living through a moment of polycrisis, so it's a helpful reminder to test my assumptions.
At some level we may be in heated agreement, with different baselines, different goals, and different orientations toward the realm of the possible. My baseline is what is informed by what i believe is possible; my sense of trends is informed both by history, but more importantly by direction. The data is quite clear that we are heading in the wrong direction on virtually all macro trends (not with respect to any particular historical benchmark, but with respect to the future in relationship to the present: is it going to be better). My goal is not prosperity; prosperity was always intended to be a means to an end, and whatever virtues its pursuit may have had until now (which I don't think is helpful to debate) it's quite clear that its continued pursuit imperils the planet (we are living through the 6th great -- and first human-caused -- mass extinction).
My goal is wellbeing, or belonging: are we moving closer to or farther from a world where everyone belongs? While there are a number of positive trends (this is where I orient my work), it's clear to me that the trendlines are not positive.
I think both cynicism and optimism are counterproductive; both lead to inaction. I prefer an active hope, a commitment to taking action on the side of justice, in service of the world we long for. Scott gets a wide readership, and the overwhelming discourse in the comments seems to agree with his primary thesis, so it felt important to me to invite people to consider a different perspective. If you genuinely think the status quo is more or less fine... then we have very different perspectives, which i trust will lead us to very different courses of action. I wish i shared your optimism!
I think most of the people who say "climate change" are using that as short-hand to refer to their sense that there are already way too many people, they don't think there should be more people, and they're already dismayed at the current environmental degradation they see with their own eyes around them (plus they don't have a strong, or maybe any, desire for kids).
A LOT of people who don't desire kids really, really like and care about animals. Sometimes more than humans. And they like forests and open space and nature preserves and untouched wild lands and habitat for animals. You are not going to convince them with these mathematical calculations about the potential carbon impact on hypothetical future people because they look around TODAY and are upset at how many people there are already here NOW and how much they're encroaching on animal habitat and creating pollution and cutting down forests and paving over things.
Also, I guess there are some people who just love being in mega-cities around tons of tons of people like ants in a hive, but I don't think that's a majority opinion. A lot of people want space, and don't like crowding.
I live in a state and metro area that has seen rapid population growth. Almost *everyone* here...conservatives, progressives, those with big families, those with no kids...virtually everyone complains CONSTANTLY about there being too many people and wishing people would stop moving here. We don't like the fact that the highways are constantly under construction to add new lanes yet the traffic gets worse and worse every year. We don't like seeing every inch of previous farm land and open space get developed. We don't like that you used to be able to easily escape to the mountains and now you sit and wait for an hour in a massive line of cars and the trails are all loud and crowded. We don't like the crowds everywhere you go and inability to escape them. We don't like the skyrocketing increase in cost of living. People don't like it! And the birth-rate has plunged while in-migration continues unabated from other states. I mean, it's great for my property values, but in many ways quality of life is worse.
Young people look around and see that while they grew up in a house with a yard and knew everyone in their neighborhood, they will likely have to live in an apartment if they stay in the area, and their kids will be lucky to get a tiny crappy apartment, in the crappy part of town. They see the disappearing wild spaces. They see the increased competition for less and less pay-off. And they don't like it and don't want to add to it.
So regardless of your charts and your math, this is an aesthetic and moral preference. I'm guessing the majority of you pro-natalists have some kind of hard-wired preference for growth and expansion and more more more, but I don't think that is the inclination of a majority of people (I also think the vast majority of people who hold that view are male).
The ecological motivation also lies on top of just not wanting kids much. Here's an experiment. Virtually all of the ecological arguments against kids are also applicable to dogs and cats. They eat a lot of meat products and we spend a ton of money and waste a lot of resources on dog food and treats and cat litter and I'm sure there's a big carbon impact. But try telling any of these anti-kid millennials that we should have less dogs, and that less people should have dogs...they won't like that at all. Because a lot of them truly like dogs more than people. Which I know infuriates the pro-natalists. But I don't really know how you can hector people out of a clear preference. And apparently in the evolutionary contest of being an appealing organism that evokes compassion and care-taking in humans, dogs and cats win.
Ha, I love it. I might have kids too if I had 700 years to do it, and could live in Rivendell.
"So regardless of your charts and your math, this is an aesthetic and moral preference."
You can call people who try to block development and then whine there aren't enough houses around holders of different aesthetic and moral preferences. I just call them wrong.
"I'm guessing the majority of you pro-natalists have some kind of hard-wired preference for growth and expansion and more more more, but I don't think that is the inclination of a majority of people (I also think the vast majority of people who hold that view are male)."
I would say most people just adopt the views of the local elite so long as one can hold them without immediate pain. So people won't give up their cars, but will endorse climate change action on an abstract level. The minority who can think for themselves, well, wouldn't want to get the host in trouble...
Who blocks new development and then whines about there not being enough houses? Maybe that happens in SF, where people feel the need to give lip service to the need for more housing to showcase their progressive bona fides, while their actual preference is to maintain their neighborhood the way it is. Around here, people have no compunction about stating their strong preference for no new development, no more people, they like it the way it is now (or was five years ago) and any new people can figure it out somewhere else and build new towns, away from them. A lot of local energy goes into opposing new development and infrastructure, and the equity based appeals to think of the poor people who want to live here and can't afford it don't seem to have much persuasive power.
Good summary. I generally fall into this camp. I care deeply about non-human animals and the preservation of their habitat and resources. We live on a finite planet, with complex interconnected systems. Humans can't just keep expanding ad nauseam without serious tradeoffs. I also admit, I've never had strong feelings toward having kids, so it makes having this position pretty painless, personally.
"Also, I guess there are some people who just love being in mega-cities around tons of tons of people like ants in a hive, but I don't think that's a majority opinion. A lot of people want space, and don't like crowding."
Then why do the majority of people live in big cities, and why do more and more people keep moving into cities?
Your post reads a bit "Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded.”
A majority of people don't live in big cities. A majority of people live in suburbs or "metro areas" but that's not at all the same as actually living in the city (and certainly not a "big city"). And the reason is because that's where the jobs are. As we saw last year, if people could do their work from anywhere, plenty would be happy to move to less dense areas.
"Where the jobs are" seems like a good reason to choose a place to live. If metro areas are not at all the same as cities, then we're probably talking about different things, because most "metro areas" look like what I would call a "city" to me.
Personally, I live in a small town (because that is where my job is) with plenty of access to nature, and I would move to a city/metro area in a heartbeat, if my wife and I could find a job in one.
"I live in a state and metro area that has seen rapid population growth. Almost *everyone* here...conservatives, progressives, those with big families, those with no kids...virtually everyone complains CONSTANTLY about there being too many people and wishing people would stop moving here. We don't like the fact that the highways are constantly under construction to add new lanes yet the traffic gets worse and worse every year. We don't like seeing every inch of previous farm land and open space get developed. We don't like that you used to be able to easily escape to the mountains and now you sit and wait for an hour in a massive line of cars and the trails are all loud and crowded. We don't like the crowds everywhere you go and inability to escape them. We don't like the skyrocketing increase in cost of living. People don't like it! And the birth-rate has plunged while in-migration continues unabated from other states. I mean, it's great for my property values, but in many ways quality of life is worse."
See, you lived in a great place. A place where more people wanted to live. So they kept moving in. Makes it worse for you, but surely it is an improvement over wherever all those other people are coming from. If not, they would stop moving in. So on net, it sounds like more people are better off the more dense wherever you are in gets. I understand that it sucks for the original residents, but what can we do? NIMBY, I guess.
I think I see your point though. That idyllic life that the American middle class enjoyed during the second half of the 20th century must be hard to give up. Had I been part of that, maybe I would be against "growth and expansion" too. But coming from a poor country, my best chance at anything anywhere that was immigrating and ruining it for you and your descendants. Sorry.
Sorry for the triple post, but might there be something there?
Americans feel existential dread because, in many ways, the world they grew up in, their way of life, has considerably changed. Republicans blame it on immigrants/atheism/social justice while democrats blame it on capitalism/the carbon economy/republicans or something like that.
Sure, I don't at all blame or fault immigrants (whether from other states or countries) for wanting to move here...I wanted to move here too, it's a gorgeous area with a great blend of city amenities and outdoor recreation access. But at a certain tipping point of population, many of the charms will be ruined (or at least made less charming). My sense is that this is not really as much of a conservative/progressive thing as people make it out, as everyone wants to preserve what is nice about what they already have, and wants things to also be nicer for other people, but only to the extent that there's no skin off their own back. They just talk about it differently, as you pointed out, with conservatives being more blunt and less concerned with hurting feelings and progressives operating from the standpoint that people can be or or should be more altruistic than they actually are.
But where I live, it is very politically mixed with as many Trump people as Bernie people, and like I said, *everyone* complains about it getting too crowded and there being too much traffic and formerly peaceful recreation areas now being loud and crowded.
I'm someone who cares a lot about animals. I have my own pets, who live a life of extreme comfort and luxury. I also donate a lot to animal charities. What I *don't* do, which I could, is open my own home and let 30 more stray animals live here, because even though it would make those 30 animals lives much better, it would make the existing human, canine, and feline residents of my house lives worse.
The distinction in my mind between living in a "city" versus a metro area is that in a city you have to live in a multi-dwelling unit, whether that's a tall apartment tower or a four-unit brownstone, while metro areas generally encompass the surrounding areas that are single-family residences on their own plot of land. I technically live in a city by my address and voting district, but in reality I'm a 20 minute drive from downtown and live in an area with miles of single-family homes. To me, that's suburbs, while as a technical/legal matter it gets characterized as metro.
I don't disagree with anything you said, and obviously it's a desirable area and I certainly don't fault anyone who wants to move here (I moved here myself from a different state 20 years ago). I'm just pointing out that if we're talking about what the majority preference is, that seems to be living NEAR a city but still on a single-family plot and with lots of access to forest/wildlands. That is achievable with low/no population growth (or population shrinkage), and it is not with population growth, which requires more people living densely.
Yeah, people just get *weird* about global warming.
Yes, it's real. Yes, it's bad. But it's malaria-scale bad, not Cthulhu-is-eating-all-of-humanity-scale bad. We deal with worse all the time. It's worth some effort to mitigate, but you don't need to derange your whole life or society over it.
You raise the issue about what will happen politically if many people who accept climate change as real decide not to have children as a result, while those people who reject it have lots of kids. I think this raises a broader point – if you compare secular socially liberal people with social and religious conservatives, one can observe a big difference in rates of reproduction: on average, the social and religious conservatives have bigger families and start younger, and the difference is even more stark at the extreme/radical ends of religious conservatism (groups such as Latin Mass Catholics, the Amish, Haredi Jews). In the long-run, doesn't this risk resulting in social/religious conservatism making a "comeback" due to outbreeding the secular social liberals? Of course, the counter-argument is that many of today's secular social liberals themselves are defectors from religious conservative upbringings, defections will continue in future generations, and those defections will counteract the religious conservative advantage in births. I think the big issue here is we can't predict what those rates of defection are going to be in the future – it is possible it may not be high enough to prevent a future in which religious conservatives become the demographic majority, and then use their demographic majority to gain political control of society, assuming society retains a democratic system – a turn away from democracy may be one way for secular liberals to retain control even in the face of a growing religious conservative demographic majority, but I think many secular liberals would view that as compromising their own liberalism. I think, religious and conservative groups vary widely in their strategies for retaining their members (especially their young people) and the success of those strategies. However, simply through natural selection, the groups with the most successful anti-defection strategies are going to have greater success, and their strategies may then be copied (consciously or unconsciously) by other groups – so it is possible that defection rates may decline over time, which would increase the likelihood of a future in which religious conservatives have significantly more control over society than at present.
As more information has become more available to more people, each generation is less religious than the last. With the internet, this trend has spiked dramatically. People are not going back to being religious, which has always depended on shielding people from outside information and perspectives.
I live in an area that was EXTREMELY religious just 30 years ago, and had big families. The current 20 and 30-somethings are dropping out of the religion in droves and having much smaller families, and are much more progressive. Once the boomers die out, this solidly red state will almost certainly flip blue. So I don't think Scott's argument on this point holds much water.
You are right, there has (in many places) a big shift away from religious conservatism over the last few decades. However, religious conservatives still exist today, and the ones who still exist today may be rather different from the ones who dropped out and fell away over the last few decades. Those who remain may have much better "memetic immunity" to the information of which you speak. It is no longer new, their leaders openly reject it rather than try to hide it, they've built up a body of counterarguments and counter-narratives in which they inculturate their members. Not all religious conservatives are equal – some were always more likely to defect than others, and I think the secular mainstream has picked off much of the "easy pickings" and many of those who still remain may be much harder to shift, and may even pass on that immovability to the greater number of their children (some of whom will still defect anyway, but long-term demographic victory does not require defections to be kept to zero, only kept below a certain level). New technologies bring new possibilities of access to information, but also new possibilities of control over information – many Haredi Jews now have "Kosher Internet" apps installed on their phones and computers, apps which block access to opinions of which their Rabbis disapprove, and in some cases even allow religious leaders to monitor the online activities of their members and respond proactively to those who appear to be at greatest risk of defection. And, if you look at the amount of far-right, QAnon, pro-Trump, climate-denying, "COVID is a hoax and vaccines are deadly poisons", Islamist, etc, information being spread on today's Internet, is it really true that free access to information guarantees the spread of secular liberalism? The technology itself just transmits data, it is neutral as to whether that data is information or misinformation, true or false, rational or irrational. So, there is no guarantee the current shift away from religious conservatism will continue indefinitely, and it is unlikely to continue to the point that religious conservatives die out – on the contrary, I think religious conservatism will reach its nadir (probably not quite there yet), and afterwards is very likely to undergo a rebound of new growth. The biggest question is how far that rebound will go.
"I live in an area that was EXTREMELY religious just 30 years ago, and had big families. The current 20 and 30-somethings are dropping out of the religion in droves and having much smaller families, and are much more progressive. Once the boomers die out, this solidly red state will almost certainly flip blue. "
Is that because the younger people deeply rooted in that state are flipping, or because Democrats from out of state are moving in?
It's both. We have a massive influx of tech companies and educated, cosmopolitan, secularists moving in, but the under 40 native demographic is also much less religious and conservative. Of course, those young people don't vote in anywhere near the same numbers as the over 55s, so I don't expect the state to flip until the older generation actually starts dying. Probably at least a decade away. But from what I can tell, all of the western states (ID, NV, UT, AZ) are on the same course as Colorado, both with in-immigration and change among the young generation (note it was the western states that went for Bernie in the 2016 and/or 2020 primaries). My guess is the western states become a solid blue voting block by 2040.
I disagree about the death of religion, but only because I use the word "religion" differently. When taken to mean something like "belief in a god or gods", it's a distinction irrelevant to all the ways people use it. People certainly /think/ that religion is relevant to morality, yet "religion" taken as belief in or worship of gods or spirits has usually had little relation to morality. Throughout much of history, and much of the world, religion was and is practical and transactional, and devoid of morality. Nor do most religions "provide meaning" to people. That's the business of the bookish, philosophical, Axial Age religions and their descendants.
What seems to me more important is to have a word to name the category of ideologies that give people absolute (bogus) certainty and make them unable to change their minds or see other points of view; that inspire them to fanaticism and violence; that take over their lives to the point where all their thought and action is centered around that ideology; that give them a moral perspective and rulebook. This category does not include Sumerian, Greek, or Roman religion, and I think also excludes many ancient Polynesian, Central American, and African religions although I can't give as much support for this claim. It definitely includes Platonism, Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, Marxism, progressivism, Nazism, and the social justice movement; probably Romanticism and modern art; and perhaps European football and a few other sports.
This isn't idle speculation; the path from Platonism, to Christianity, to Hegel, is clear; as is its split after Hegel into left Hegelians (from whom we get Marxism and "the left", which are not liberalism), right Hegelianism (from whom we get Nazism and "the right", which are not conservativism); and unitarian universalism (from which we get progressivism and the social justice movement).
So I say we're in the middle of yet another religious "Great Awakening". The absence of a designated anthropomorphic God makes not one whit of difference. Nor will these secular religions behave any more reasonably than the old goddish ones.
I do think temperament is a "cause" of fanaticism. But I think it is now again possible to live without ideology, or with less ideology. As an example, I'll try to distinguish between ideological and less-ideological approaches to a single topic: diversity and freedom of thought.
John Stuart Mill represents an anti-ideological approach, which is based more on pragmatism than on morality: It's sometimes necessary for society to endorse an official opinion on a matter of fact, in order to enable progress from worse to better organizations of society. But it's still important to let people disagree with society's opinion, because society can never be sure it has the matter figured out correctly.
People of many different belief systems could use Mill's argument; yet people with ideologies, which almost as a matter of definition exclude from consideration the possibility that they're wrong, could not.
Multiculturalism represents an ideological approach to the same question. How can you conceive of diversity and toleration if you believe you already hold certain truth? It seems to me that the only way is to partition social beliefs into ones you consider matters of fact, on which disagreement will NOT be allowed; and ones you consider matters of opinion or preference, on which disagreement is allowed. (This is an ancient distinction made by Socrates in Xenophon's /Memorabilia/.)
This is what multi-culturalism does: it posits its own culture's ideological beliefs as culture-independent "truth", and leaves to "culture" only "matters of opinion" such as style of dress, manner of speech, art, and cuisine. Beliefs which affect behavior--say, religious beliefs--must be categorized as one or the other: Either the belief is declared to be a culture-neutral absolute truth; or it is declared to be an evil error; or its affect on behavior is denied.
In order to conceal the fact that one is slicing up cultures in this way, it may be further necessary to make a truth / error / opinion categorization about entire cultures; and this is again what our multi-culturalism has done, taking its own Ivy League culture as truth; allowing Islam, Buddhism, and all other non-threatening ideologies and cultures as mere opinions or conventions; and condemning all competing cultures on its home territory wholesale as error.
Well yes, I agree there are certainly substitute fervently believed and enforced moral codes that don't rely on a supernatural God. I was talking strictly about the ones based on ancient texts and an anthropomorphic god and afterlife.
"Nor will these secular religions behave any more reasonably than the old goddish ones."
I think you answered your question with the term secular religion. I think the west was built in part on the value of separating the state from religion. But with the transition to secular religions, this separation has collapsed. I believe the secular moral ideologies are going to butt heads, with those not subscribing to the progressive mantra thrown out of all respectable civic institutions. And when I mention this to progressives, half of them dismiss it, and the other half clap their hands in glee.
On a scale of threats to humanity, I worry a whole lot more about the friction between secular ideologies than I do about global warming. Indeed, AGW is one such battle line on the (so-far) Cold War.
In my sample, I definitely think that among my extended group there are people convinced that having kids is at best neutral and do not feel encouraged by our culture to have kids, sometimes outgroup gets blamed for their fear over having children. But I am afraid there are a lot of subtle and not so subtle cues throughout our society which indicate a low value placed on creating a bigger and better next generation.
I mean the R/K selection thing applies.If you're making a bigger generation, it probably isnt a better generation as you naturally have less resources and attention to spend on each individual child. It likely makes more sense to focus on say the gifted children or the oldest son/daughter or something like that as is what historically happened.
Setting climate change aside, I'm curious whether it's better for the world to (i) donate $x to effective altruism causes where $x is the cost of raising a child in the first world (including the monetary equivalent of time costs, etc.), or (ii) raise a child, say if the potential parent is a typical ACX reader.
The problem with climate change is it increases the tail risks of catastrophe right? Massive feedback loops or the political impacts of drought/fires/floods etc. the impacts are also non-linear so saying we have felt 25 % of the impact is inaccurate. All the coral reefs will die at 2 degrees. There will be many more step changes like that, which we haven't started to really feel yet.
The effect of CO2 is also non-linear, in that it is logarithmic. Double CO2 from pre-Industrial and you get a direct effect of 1 degree, which you then have to double again to get another degree. It sounds like there is strong agreement that the Transient Climate Response is 1.2 degrees of immediate effect with additive factors while the IPCC's estimate for Equilibrium Sensitivity seems to be in the range of 3 degrees, coming into full effect at an unknown point for instance as transfer of heat into the oceans may not find its way back into surface temperatures for centuries
This is believed to be the cause of an unexpected 20 year pause where there was no statistically significant surface warming with the starting point of the hot 1998 El Nino. The temperature did not hit a statistically significant rise until another hot El Nino at which point the temperature trend either had or was near breaking below the 95% confidence interval of warming projections
What did the corals do when Earth was 2 °C warmer?
Great question. Does anyone have the answer? My guess is that it was some combo of them gradually shifting away from the equator by a few hundred miles, and the coral adapting to be hardier at higher temperatures.
Mostly they went extinct.
http://globalreefproject.com/coral-reef-history.php
The essay was good and needed, but saying that 3 meters of sea-level rise by 2200 is a worst-case scenario is just wrong. We don't really know how fast ice sheets disintegrate; Greenland and West Antarctica fully collapsing would be 12 meters in addition to thermal expansion and glacier melt, and that's not implausible in 200 years. A runaway greenhouse effect like on Venus is also a real existential risk. It's not a linear system.
The thing is more that, as I said, 200 years is a long time, and IMO the bigger existential risk from climate change remains the threat that the slightly worsened political instability slightly raises the chance of nuclear war. We've got a lot of other problems, even over shorter time horizons, and anyhow we have more ideas for geoengineering our way out of global warming than for averting AGI risk, ending poverty, etc..
> A runaway greenhouse effect like on Venus is also a real existential risk
No it is not. Burning all coal (including lignite and other low grade coal), releasing all organics locked in permafrost and wetlands, burning all carbohydrates and so one would not be not enough.
Human-caused Venus-like situation due to burning fossil fuels is not a real concern.
See https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/please-dont-give-up-on-having-kids/comment/3202852 or thread on that
(to clarify: there are real concerns and humans would have existential issues long before lead would melt on surface)
"The thing is more that, as I said, 200 years is a long time, and IMO the bigger existential risk from climate change remains the threat that the slightly worsened political instability slightly raises the chance of nuclear war."
If the existential risk is A, then resources should go directly towards mitigating A, not towards mitigating B, which might have a small effect on A.
As someone who leans antinatalist, I have a different interpretation of the widespread concern that having kids might be unethical on a warming planet: the belief that human life just isn't very good is very common. As Scott points out, the problems that will be caused by climate change aren't extraordinary ones in the grand scheme of human experience. But they're enjoying to convince millions that life might not be worth living. These people fundamentally agree with the basic case for antinatalism on the grounds of reducing human suffering, even if they would bristle at being described that way. And I'm willing to bite the bullets Scott proffers in this post - the preponderance of horrific suffering in our past, present, and anticipated future are precisely why I'm an antinatalist.
If you poll people and ask them if they feel like they live shitty lives, what percentage of people do you think would say they do?
If I don't feel my life is shitty in the least and I don't consider myself to be the luckiest among us, would you still count my life as shitty because you are applying some standards other than my own?
What evidence would you use to show that someone is deluded about their own subjective contentment, that they are in the midst of an optimism bias, and what their lives "actually are"? How would you make the case that your assessment of things is any more accurate?
It seems perfectly understandable to me that a person would feel like their own life is shitty and that they feel subjectively that the world around them is shitty. But it strikes me as a kind of typical mind fallacy to assert that anyone who feels differently from you about their own life and their view of the world is in the grips of a delusion.
Overproduced elites are telling each other to stop reproducing.
Re. "Remember, most presidential elections are very close. So even though 5% fewer kids will only decrease carbon emissions by 1-2%, it will decrease Democrats’ chance of winning elections by a lot more.":
It seems more likely to me that our two modern political parties, with their polls, social-media-spiders, computers, and marketing experts, each continually try to adjust their positions as far away from each other as they can get and still win 51% of the vote. Any demographic advantage will be spent on endorsing a more extreme platform.
I hope that the Climate Change fanatics do not reproduce. Just imagine a world without any Greta Thunbergs.
Chuds and deplorables, from oil slick to shining plastic gyre.
My People:-)
Wait I skimmed this article and it doesn't address the strongest environmental (and other cause areas, up to and including pronatalism) argument for not having children: the same resources can be better used elsewhere.
It would be pretty surprising to me if on the margin the most cost-effective intervention to combat climate change is by having children, for either the majority of my social circle or the majority of readers of this blog.
I'd guess that for most people who think about this sort of thing, the counterfactual isn't "I'll donate the money I save by not having children to Cause X", but instead something mostly X-neutral, like early retirement.
Though I agree that this falls apart on closer inspection, at least if we're looking from a broadly consequentialist perspective.
I see a lot of Americans in the comments saying that lower birth rates are a problem because of the tax base / productive population shrinking over time. I really don't see any reason to worry about this if you're in the US. There are innumerable young, productive immigrants desperately wanting to get into this country but kept out by the law - and I'm not talking about refugees but educated workers with degrees who are held back by H1B/green card quotas etc. As a person who only recently got a visa to the US through such a quota, I do't believe this will change in our lifetime. If people in the US have fewer children, they can just open the gates a bit wider, and the population will be fine.
I actually deeply disagree with this (and the comment below) from personal experience. I can't imagine I'd be of much use to my country if I were still stuck there, limited and miserable. Also true for many people I know. People at their full potential can give back more, even from a distance, than people trapped and stuck in a rut.
(I'm also annoyed and upset by the notion that it's somehow wrong to allow people like me to live where we want on the basis of what's best for a country we didn't choose to be born in, but that's a side topic)
You'll have to provide incentives for people to stay in those areas, like say the state doing policies to maintain industrial capacity in those areas. Improved city development.city upgrades would work well also, and general public transportation.
The United States could fund those countries in exchange or engage in cultural exchange programs or literally annex them (if they're small countries in the Western Hemisphere or literally next to the US, like Mexico).
Populations everywhere are declining, not just in the US.
Definitely not *everywhere*. Plenty of countries are seeing growth, even if it's slightly-lower-than-past-years growth.
I also think that wouldn't contradict my point. The US is one of the most desirable destinations for immigrants. As long as it's willing to open the gates, it'll be among the very last countries to suffer.
Yeah I was sloppy. I think what I meant to say is that the population growth rate is declining everywhere, not that populations everywhere are declining! My ad!
"As long as it's willing to open the gates, it'll be among the very last countries to suffer."
Sure but what matters is global utility, not US utility. Declining populations is probably bad because it means decreased endogenous innovation, etc, though I'm not confident.
To the extent that poverty is genetic, taking immigrants from poor counties will lower the standard of living for the native population.
Are you sure this isn't a Simpson's paradox issue?
But as he just said, a lot of immigration is HB1s and skilled workers. There are several immigrant groups in the US that are far more successful, on average, than the native population here.
While the United States can absorb a significant amount of immigrants and has in the past, there is probably an upper level of immigration that the U.S. can take and stay politically contiguous. At the highest level, around 14 percentage was foreign born. Argentina for a period of time had it at 50% foreign-born. Both countries took immigrants from culturally similar countries mainly (Argentina with lots of Italians, French etc the United States with lots of Germans, Swedes, etc).
Determining which immigrants you absorb is probably a good idea. The United States would probably do better with less cultural clash from absorbing lots of people from the countries south of it, as well as East Asian countries as opposed, to wahhabist Islamist states or something bue to relative cultural similarities.
I do suspect the US does have a higher practical tolerance for immigration then theorized, but there are still political restrictions and your government will have to come up with programs to get your existing citizens to calm down at all the migrants, i.e. mentioning they're humans like you and want a better life etc.
I haven't read every comment, but this is the most polite, civil, thoughtful online discussion of climate change I have seen. This gives me great hope.
At long last, I will subscribe.
I've never seen anything comparable to ACX commenters, even in the original blog where being able to comment was free
Is commenting not free here? Should I be paying someone for my ability to comment?
I see that I bamboozled myself into subscribing. However I do consider it worthwhile regardless, lol
Your response to the first line of argument is good. As far as the second one, I'd just like to add that utilitarianism is bad and you shouldn't let your decision as to whether or not to reproduce hinge on the calculation of whether this is on net beneficial for the remainder of the planet.
Apologies if someone has already written this, I haven't had time to read through all the replies.
I really like this post and strongly agree, but I think you may have missed the point that's most important in my mind. If we're going to beat global climate change, we're going to need a strong economy to fund research and development into new technologies (renewables, carbon capture, etc.). Having an aging population that isn't replacing itself is really bad for economic growth (not just total growth, but growth per capita) and having a larger population makes returns on R&D a lot more attractive, since the fixed cost can be be recouped more easily when you have more potential customers.
In America, for instance, we're going to need close to a fixed amount of younger people to take care of our generation when we're older and we're going to have something close to a fixed amount of government debt that will need to be serviced each year from the taxpayers. If we have 200mm working age adults in the next generation instead of 150mm, that burden is spread a lot more thinly, and a greater percentage of society can devote itself to novel R&D. Almost throughout the developed world birth rates are declining, and economists are pretty consistent in considering this a major macroeconomic issue.
We can't shrink our way to net zero emissions. Shrinking our population can only marginally improve carbon emissions, but that won't be enough. If anything, shrinking will hurt the economy, and when the economy is struggling people tend not to care about anything else, especially measures that won't have an impact for decades. The best way to get to net zero fastest is, ironically, to grow ourselves there, providing a strong economy, but balancing it with good policy that makes sure that a large enough percentage of our economy is dedicated to improving the climate.
Having a smaller population languishing for generations with minimal technological progress will cause a lot more emissions in the long run than having a larger population that can fix these issues (as well as whatever other issues that may arise) generations earlier.
I really support people having children even in the face of the climate crisis.
However, I think the strongest argument that I have heard so far is that children are just a high opportunity cost and the money and time spent on them should go into activism, since we are at a decisive moment for how bad it will be. Is there a counter to this argument?
Quote from somewhere (didn't write that bit down)
In his 1967 book The Sense of an Ending, the literary critic Frank Kermode argued that human beings try to give significance to our short lives in the long sweep of history by placing ourselves in the middle of a narrative arc. That arc typically traces civilization's fall from a golden age through a current stage of decadence to an impending apocalypse—one that may, through the bold efforts of the current generation, usher in a new age.
"The great majority of interpretations of Apocalypse assume that the End is pretty near," observed Kermode. But since the end never arrives, "the historical allegory is always having to be revised….And this is important. Apocalypse can be disconfirmed without being discredited. This is part of its extraordinary resilience."
The dire prophecies of the first Earth Day have been mostly proven wrong, but the prophets of an always-impending environmental apocalypse have not thereby been discredited. Auguries of imminent catastrophe remain resilient, even as the world of 2020 is in a much happier state than the Catastrophists of 1970 ever expected.
Ok, that is a good point, but that doesn't completely refute the argument.
For every decade so far I would still want people to spend more time on activism to get rid of catastrophic threats. Even now that I now that there was no nuclear annihilation during the cold war I would still urge people in the past to be more active against this threat, since the threat is still real.
I would expect people 100 years from now to still advise us to spend more energy on mitigating climate change, even if it isn't such a civilisation ending threat, since there is still a risk and a potential pay-off transitioning sooner.
excellent point, well made
One counter is that you might be wrong, your activism might be making things worse rather than better. One of the weird things about the world is how, on a variety of issues, about half the people think it is important to do X, about half think it is important to not do X, and almost all are sure they are right.
For a real-world example, one of the biggest things activists got the U.S. to do was biofuels. That apparently, as Al Gore himself has conceded, has no net effect on CO2 output. It does, however, convert something like ten percent of global production of Maize into alcohol, pushing up the price of maize and doing our bit to contribute to world hunger.
So the counter is that enthusiastic would-be activists, for any cause, should give significant weight to the possibility that their cause makes the world worse, not better. Having a child and doing a good job of bringing the child up, in contrast, has directly observed positive consequences.
>having a kid will create 60 tons of carbon a year
Or 1 ton
Neither, unless someone has invented nuclear fusion all the way up to the point of creating carbon. Say carbon dioxide if you mean carbon dioxide. There's so much bad science (on both sides of the argument) without adding to it with sloppy language.
I'm your intended audience, but I don't find your arguments (or those of other proponents in the threads) compelling.
First, I'll just say, I don't want kids first and foremost for personal lifestyle reasons and I have no issues saying that to people around me - so climate change doesn't alter my decision, but it certainly reinforces it and if others are convinced not to have kids for climate change reasons, then that's a good thing.
The central question is one of how one spends one's time. Kids take a tremendous investment of time, energy and money that can go elsewhere. The easiest thought experiment is maybe just to compare the tradeoffs between adopting a child vs having ones own. While adoption comes with greater costs and there's some complexity around moral hazard in how adoptions are done, the needs of parentless children are tremendous and adopting has zero impact on the climate while having a child has adds a net new developed-world human amount of carbon/pollution. Whatever the true number is of carbon impact of another child, we as individual humans have very little impact on the planet with anything we do and adding another human is actually hugely impactful (and I'd argue damaging) compared to all of our other activities. A developed-world human could choose to double the amount the fly every year, stop recycling, eat endless beef and do every environmentally damaging thing imaginable in their lifetimes and they'd still not contribute to climate change as much as their offspring and descendents.
This is where others would argue that offspring/descendents bring social benefits. You mentioned voting - but that's one vote, roughly 50-60% chance starting two decades down the line. I would wager that any person, given the amount of time/money it takes to raise a child, could change more than 1 vote and in less than 5 years. That's way more political impact much faster. Others bring up that children have economic impact - but how is have more workers in the economy or greater GDP a net good? We could also just have less consumers and then we'd require less economic activity to support them. More GDP is not better. More GDP per Capita is better.
Then there's the whole utility argument that people should just have kids because "that's the meaning of life" or it makes you a better person etc. That may be true but I think unpacking the philosophy here is important. My notion of "family" extends beyond my genetic lineage - my loyalty is to the human family. I don't care if my personal genes survive if instead it means that the human genome, the mammalian genome, or the earth-DNA survives. I think humans would be far better off if more of us thought like ants and bees - we don't all need to have offspring to survive and in fact we increase our collective probability of survival if less of us have offspring and instead take the energy and resources of personal child-rearing and put it into proxies of collective child-rearing.
> I'm your intended audience (...) First, I'll just say, I don't want kids first and foremost for personal lifestyle reasons
This article seems to be directed at other group, it is not some "hello everyone, go breed immediately" but "Please Don't Give Up On Having Kids Because Of Climate Change"
True - I guess I should've qualified this by saying that even if the personal lifestyle reasons went away, the climate change factors would still be barriers - and the climate change factors do constitute talking points I make to people on the fence ahead of personal lifestyle arguments.
I think the concern with runaway loops is valid, just not regarding the runaway greenhouse effect.
As climate disasters get more frequent, if systems are repeatedly unable to contain or recover from the damage or as existing institutional issues get exposed and exacerbated, that would also reduce our ability and willingness to come together to make sweeping change possible.
Models of the impact of 'climate change' by 2050 can't model for these in any meaningful way though.
Coincidentally, the people who are most likely to have the self-control to elect to not have the children in the first place are likely to be the ones whose children will disproportionately be able to address carbon emissions. We need more smart people and fewer stupid people to fix the worlds' problems. But the smart people seem to be the ones who are most likely to change their child-having habits.
I think the argument in section II is flawed, and not because of the median voter theorem.
It assumes children inherit parents' political positions. I mean, this is true, in the bird-eye statistical view, but I believe the argument requires causation, and not merely correlation. I.e., it holds if and only if parents can reliably influence their children's politics. If instead person's politics is, say, downstream from their station in life, then descendants of educated liberals will of course mostly continue being educated liberals, but having no descendants will not necessarily create less educated liberals. It might just as well free the space for some working class kids to go to college, get a job for the credentialed, join educated liberals and start voting like an educated liberal, which may just as well tilt the scales towards Democrats on net.
Personally, I believe we need more people, not less. But specifically, we need to maximize the population capable of contributing to civilizational progress. That's currently limited not by the total number of people, but by inequality that pushes most of them away from the frontier of progress. Given the above, I'm not particularly bothered by rich liberals refusing to have a child.
Most of the couples that I know, the man and the woman are of different political persuasions.
A family where everyone has the same political views seems icky to me.
The article is built on false premises. The truth is that people don't give a shit about the future of the planet as long as they believe that they're gonna be fine, and thus moral arguments like "people don't want children because they don't want to contribute to more pollution" are just as relevant for describing people's behaviour as "don't buy so much avocado toast" is towards achieving financial prosperity. People didn't care for the future by allowing this crisis to unravel. Why do you think they would suddenly care now, when there is so little to gain compared to the past?
Nowadays there is no economic incentive to have kids. In earlier times, having children was sane economic policy: they worked the fields from an younger age and maybe they took care of you when you were broken by that hard work. Nowadays, it's the opposite: children drain the economic resources of the family and require a large investment in their future education, which is usually in the form of debt. Living with high rent, student debt, stagnant and low salaries, facing high medical costs, high educational costs - where does a child factors in?
Climate change just adds to this insecurity towards the future. The mass destruction of the natural world simply resonates with people's general feeling that things are not getting better for them. The fact that our governments seem totally incompetent in tackling the climate crisis doesn't help at all. Not fixing that with "please have children", but we can pretend we tried.
And most people simply don't see any way out of their relative destitution, despite working multiple jobs and trying their best. This is a form of depression and acceptance of helplessness: there are no visible ways for people to hope for an improvement of their situation. The current socio-economic arrangements look "final" - in stark contrast with the situation in the former Communist countries, who at least had the hope that there is something better out there.
There is also no social incentive, there is no family name to "preserve", no clan to be empowered, no legacy to hand down to the future generations, no accomplishments to be proud of. We live in an increasingly anonymous world, where nobody gives a crap about your accomplishments, and some might even feel oppressed by them. If you're not rich, you're one of the anonymous many, except if you live in some alternate social group, where social capital might be different.
The article builds upon a "is not that bad" argument, and yes, nobody knows exactly, but those who know most about the effects of climate change, the climate scientists, are the most depressed ones. Even if the "facts" are correct, which probably they're not, you don't argue back with facts when people fear something. You don't seem to understand what people actually fear and what kind of forces shape their behaviour not to have children.
"children ... require a large investment in their future education"
There's no law that says that you need to save up money to send your kid to college. If you have student debt then your parents didn't do it, or didn't do enough of it, so why should you? Around 40% of kids are born to mothers who aren't even married. Sometimes these are unplanned pregnancies, other times the woman purposefully gets pregnant because "I want a baby" and she can't find a man or rejects all potential men. If you point out the fact that the father won't be in the picture and she only has a McJob, she'll reply with something like "the Lord will provide."* Wich often means the government and their families. She and the guy who's knocking her up aren't even thinking of a college fund.
If people aren't having kids because they can't afford a college fund, they're basically helping to select out of the gene pool the trait to actually care about the child's future. It's myopic and self-defeating to the extreme.
*These women aren't really religious, they don't go to church and certainly don't listen to any of the sexual morality lectures, but they absorb the ideas from American "high prole" culture which is religious.
Similar to this argument, made more than 200 years ago by Malthus on how poor peoples' unfortunate choices to have kids are a form of natural selection that we shouldn't interfere with:
“To the punishment, therefore, of nature he should be left, the punishment of severe want. He has erred in the face of a most clear and precise warning, and can have no just reason to complain of any person but himself when he feels the consequence of his error."
Maybe the belief that humanity is in negative-sum or positive-sum situation may have more important consequences than the desire for kids. First let's define positive and negative-sum states: We are in negative-sum state if one average additional human add less to the global resources (all resources, not only natural ones. Things or services that are consumed so needs to be allocated) than the current average resource share. Conversely, if we are in a positive state, on average one more human will produce more resources than the average consumption.
If we are in positive-sum, having more kids seems perfectly compatible with a effective altruistic worldview. And from a selfish point of view, high natality is something desirable on average (even if you can discuss particular cases where it may not be so, by default it should be welcomed).
I think Scott main point was to try to reconcile negative-sum state, an effective altruistic worldview and the desire for kids.
But I think another aspect is how the belief in positive or negative state influence global politics. If positive, it's logical to consider all strangers as friends by default and I see a broad collaboration as natural. It's Pinker better angels...In a negative-sum....not so much, it's global conflict, distrust of unknown groups (all the worse if they have high natality), collaboration absent at the global level and only maintained at the local level where reciprocity can be checked or enforced, and a reduced level of freedom and equality as elites becomes affraid of the masses ....quite unstable and nasty times.
Now I think it's quite difficult to assess if we are in a positive or negative sum state....but maybe if the relation between global violence/trust and the global resource status (positive or negative sum) is true, maybe it can be reversed and a measure of "global violence" à la Pinker is in fact a good indication about the type of resource-sum world we live in...
The problem with your definition is that it implicitly assumes an even distribution of resources, so that the new person gets his per capita share. A baby is not born clutching a deed to his per capita share of the Earth's land. If he wants land, at least in a market society, either he or someone else, probably his parents, has to buy it from someone else, which doesn't leave the someone else worse off.
The right question is whether the birth of an additional person produces net costs or net benefits to people other than his parents, who presumably would not have had a child if they did not believe having one was a net benefit for them. That's the question I tried to answer in my old piece for the Population Council.
Putting it in the international context, suppose an additional person is born in India. Further suppose that his net effect is to make people in India no worse off, and to have no effect on people elsewhere. His existence lowers world average income, because India has a below average income. In your terms, he adds "less to the global resources... than the current average resource share." He has made nobody worse off yet, by your criterion, he has made the world worse. That's a fallacy of composition.
My old piece (I forgot to include it in the comment):
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Laissez-Faire_In_Popn/L_F_in_Population.html
That's a perfectly valid objection, indeed using only averages is a huge (but common) approximation. Going in your direction and using some usual (I think) assumptions of economic theory, you could even argue that it's impossible for an actor to consume more than he produce, because it's capacity to acquire resource directly reflect his production. But then it's never perfect, you have the common, unpaid resources and also social safety nets and redistribution that ensure this is not the case....And in the perfect case, this ask the symmetric question: is it also impossible to produce more than your consumption? ;-)
Anyway, in your example, this hypothetical indian would indeed be neutral: the average are not usefull cause of inhomogenity of both consumption and production, but he really change nothing in the SOL of all other, which is the real definition of neutral. I guess you can also be both a net producer or net consumer depending which group you consider, which even further complicates things....but it kind of goes in the same direction of my main point: it's extremelly difficult and thus mostly ideological to check if humanity is in a positive-sum or negative-sum state....So maybe it is worth checking the consequences in term of global cooperation v.s. competition, commerce vs violence, global vs local focus, individual freedom vs centralized control, natality effect, etc. Maybe all of those are indirectly affected by the resource/population marginal cost (not sure how to call it, there should a better word tha negative/posive sum), but, while indirect, they are easier to measure (Pinker try to get some measure of those kind of things, at least).
And the recent scares (GW, covid, terrorism) pushing for more centralized control, the trouble regarding global trade between US, China, Europe, the price increase for some raw resources (wood, energy, construction stuff) and of housing, the negative inflation-adjusted interest rates, all seems to go in the direction of negative-sum-global game...Maybe it's transient, maybe it's coincidence, or maybe it's the revenge or the club of Rome and collapsology is partially right (in the phenomenon, although I do not think any Mad-Max or extinction scenario is probable, it's just going back to a more violent, more hierarchic and more local world....with reduced average SoL....
The baby is not born clutching a deed, but born in a vessel for politics and violence. A lot of deedless babies, after they grow up, are ignored at your peril.
That's why I specified "in a market society." Your child might steal stuff from my child, either through direct action or politics. But your child might also help pay off a national debt that my child was paying, share the cost of defending our country, write a book my child enjoys reading, ... . There are lots of possible positive and negative externalities, which is why the piece I published on the subject back in 1972 concluded that the size of externalities in both directions was sufficiently uncertain that I couldn't sign the sum, say whether the net was positive or negative. That's my opinion with regard to climate change as well.
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Laissez-Faire_In_Popn/L_F_in_Population.html
When calculating your sum, do you give any value to nature?
You should, because it's clearly a component of standard of living. All things equal, It's better to be surrounded by non polluted, non-crowded countryside. But not necessarily pristine: There could be indirect benefits in term of ecosystem, but disease-carrying, blood sucking insects clearly decrease quality of life. So again, it's complicated: not only is it very incompletely priced so consumable without true costs, but what is the best (from a human point of view) state of nature? It's clearly not destroyed, but it's clearly not untouched either....
I certainly do not want to preserve every variety of mosquito. If we can wipe out one particularly obnoxious species of mosquito, one of hundreds, I say go for it.
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2019/03/01/698708765/your-questions-about-italys-gmo-mosquito-experiment-answered
But that is a distraction from the fundamental question of valuing nature. What if we can triple per-capita GNP at the cost of wiping out half the species on Earth. Is that a net positive? Not in my ledger.
There are many persons in this thread who are certain their children will be a net benefit to the Earth. I wonder how much value they ascribe to nature...
I think the majority view the game as conditionally positive sum, depending on what kind of person you bring into the world.
If you consider that, depending on who you ask, the kind of person that would be an asset or a liability is different, it's even more complicated than that. One more reason to look at it though the indirect consequences instead of trying to use direct measurements...
>>we only have the next few years to solve the climate crisis reasonably well<<
This is BS.
* We are not going to solve the "climate crisis reasonably well". Anyone who follows politics should know this. Things are going to get worse slowly. OTOH we are not going to lose billions of people.
Fewer people are the only viable solution. Fortunately this is happening rapidly (about as fast as could be imagined giving the enormous inertia of population).
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-53409521
Is everybody ignoring the fact that if everyone has two children, the population will decline?
Stewart Brand:
>>Worldwide, birthrates are in free fall. Around one-third of countries now have birthrates below replacement level (2.1 children per woman) and sinking. Nowhere does the downward trend show signs of leveling off. Nations already in a birth dearth crisis include Japan, Italy, Spain, Germany, and Russia – whose population is now in absolute decline and is expected to be 30 percent lower by 2050. On every part of every continent and in every culture (even Mormon), birthrates are headed down. They reach replacement level and keep on dropping. It turns out that population decrease accelerates downward just as fiercely as population increase accelerated upward, for the same reason. Any variation from the 2.1 rate compounds over time.<<
https://www.technologyreview.com/2005/05/01/231115/environmental-heresies-2/
South Korea has a fertility rate of 1.0! HALF OF REPLACEMENT RATE.
China is expected to begin population decline within ten years.
China will quite possibly not exist as a functioning nation-state within ten years, but I agree that places like Korea and Italy are in for a very rough time.
https://youtu.be/b1IJ9kqBilE?t=380
There's either going to be some kind of system crash followed by a rather rocky transition to more conservative governments and lifestyles, or we'll use transhuman technologies to patch over the problem by escaping the human condition. The liberal status quo is not sustainable.
People are having fewer children because they live in cities. This is not rocket science.
Brand in 2005:
>>Cities are population sinks-always have been. Although more children are an asset in the countryside, they’re a liability in the city. A global tipping point in urbanization is what stopped the population explosion. As of this year, 50 percent of the world’s population lives in cities, with 61 percent expected by 2030. In 1800 it was 3 percent; in 1900 it was 14 percent.<<
In what sense are children an asset in the countryside within developed nations? Unless you're living like the Amish, it's currently illegal to use them as labour.
A lot of people could also reasonably afford to move out into the suburbs or rural areas and still make a good living if having children was their main priority (which would also help to revitalise rural areas.) Being in the cities is a sign that this wasn't their priority to begin with.
>>In conclusion, climate change will probably be very bad for the world, but not in a way that will have catastrophic effects on your child in particular. Cancelling plans to have kids because of climate change will decrease emissions a very limited amount, while having a disproportionately large effect on the government’s ability to pass climate change related legislation. A less destructive way of assuaging your guilt over having children would be to donate some money to climate charities or carbon offsets in your kid’s name. Nobody who really wants a kid should avoid having one because of climate-related concerns.<<
I almost always agree with your thinking, so it's a novelty to read something I disagree with.
First let me clarify that your analysis of the actual risks from AGW is excellent. The biggest risk (and you focus on this) is sea-level rise. This will be extremely disruptive but will not actually kill many people.
Now if your goal is to assuage guilt over having children, I'm right there with you. No guilt required. World fertlity is in free fall. Anyone who wants kids should go right ahead. I recommend two or one, but I'm not going to lose sleep over three or four.
So fine: FOLKS, DON'T FEEL GUILTY ABOUT HAVING KIDS!!
>>Cancelling plans to have kids because of climate change will decrease emissions a very limited amount,<<
NOW this is where you go off the rails. You are imagining fewer American Democrats. In a few decades of "climate change will probably be very bad for the world" Republicans will be screaming for action to slow down global warming.
Imagine if every generation had an average of one kid. As Brand points out, the effect is geometric:
Gen 1: 4 billion kids (SWAG)
Gen 2: 2 billion kids
Gen 3: 1 billion kids
Gen 4: .5 billion kids
How long is four generations? Perhaps 150 years. You better believe that .5 B kids instead of 4 B will generate a lot less carbon.
I'm exaggerating the rate of population decline to make the effect more graphic. So it takes 300 years instead of 150. Not having kids would decrease emissions by an ENORMOUS amount over time.
Sure, in a hypothetical world where climate change is still a thing in 300 years. And where there are no population subset effects (ie groups who ignore everyone else and just have as many kids as they can.)
"Sure" is a big deal. Can you point to any other solution that will "surely" work? A solution that is already underway?
Rational types have this technique where you try to make the strongest argument possible for the other side, maybe even an argument so good that it could convince people on your side to change their minds. When I applied this sort of thinking to the pro life/pro choice issue (I’m pro life), I came up with something like an inversion of your ‘there will be less Democrats to stop climate change denial’ argument. Then I realized the logic applied to several other issues people on the right tend get worked up about.
To wit: People on the right are always getting worked up about people on the left’s reproductive choices (direct and indirect). Many things could qualify: same-sex relationships, transgenderism, sex strikes (proposed during the height of #metoo), and the aforementioned issue of abortion. But should they get worked up? All of these options likely decrease, in ways both big and small, the future number of people on the left, exclusively. So, in some perhaps Machiavellian sort of way, shouldn’t people on the right be *encouraging* people on the left to embrace these things instead of decrying them?
I know that’s kind of evil, but I think rational types would have to admit it’s a damn persuasive argument to make to people on the right! Of course, the same sort of argument could be made to people on the left about, say, the refusal to wear masks or get vaccinated or the propensity to down toxic horse paste, etc. I feel like you may have made this point somewhere recently.
This is a valid point. I think Scott admitted/covered it in his piece. It’s not meant to be a perfect science, just a directional idea. On balance, the children of Republicans are more likely to lean toward core Republican values and away from core Democrat values — in so far as party affiliation is a proxy for the beliefs and activities under discussion.
“from the testimonies of the abortion providers we *know*…Republicans have abortions just as often as democrats.”
Your confidence level in this information, which seems to be the basis for your counter-claim, seems disproportionate to the source of that information. I personally would need to see some data before entertaining this claim at all, let alone being so confident in it that I believed Republicans and Democrats have abortions in equal numbers. On its face, given the demographics of both abortion and party affiliation, this seems highly unlikely.
My compliments to you for being willing to do this kind of expansive thinking.
Now data on abortions: possibly red-state per-capita abortion rates vs blue-state.
See https://www.kff.org/womens-health-policy/state-indicator/abortion-rate/?activeTab=map¤tTimeframe=0&selectedDistributions=abortion-rate&sortModel=%7B%22colId%22:%22Location%22,%22sort%22:%22asc%22%7D
Given that and the racial demographics(only 39% of abortion patients are white) it really strains credulity to imagine Republicans are getting abortions at the same rate as Democrats. One wonders how exactly "abortion providers" "know" this. Is there a box on the form stating political affiliation? Do they strike up political conversations with their patients? It's probably just wishful thinking and projection.
I looked into red states vs blue states. It's fairly noisy but what trend one can see suggests fewer abortions in red states. Mostly it suggests that states with lots of abortion clinics have the highest rates of abortions.
Sounds like special pleading to me.
I'm not sure I saw anyone rightists getting 'worked up' over sex strikes. I saw them mock them or otherwise point out the absurdity of the situation (e.g. can't make an actual argument so they'll threaten to withhold sex), but not worked up in the sense of upset or worried about it, like worried that men/themselves are going to miss out on sex.
Being pro-life requires a deep ethical objection to abortion. Most people who are pro-life view abortion as literally an act of murder. For people like that, utilitarian calculations don't factor into things.
Fair point. That was my weakest example, I admit. The sex strike was more of a humorous point when I originally made it to a friend. But it did get me thinking along these same lines.
As for "utilitarian calculations," recall my setup for this. I was trying to make the strongest argument possible for the other side, one that could potentially persuade pro-lifers to accept a pro-choice position. Of course fetus murder is still a big problem for pro-lifers and major stumbling block toward my goal. But if I could get pro-lifers to accept the logic of my argument, I think I might have a shot. After all, if less fetus murder is your ultimate goal, reducing the future population of people who consider fetus murder acceptable gets you closer to that goal.
Incidentally, this reminds me of a point the Freakonomics authors made about why crime suddenly dropped 1990s. They attributed it to abortion becoming legal after Roe v Wade. In fact, reading that may have been what originally stimulated this line of thinking.
This is hardly a novel idea, many on the right support abortion for these reasons. And I saw a lot of support for the sex strikes. It was totally indicative of the perceived cuckoldry of being a male feminist. You do everything right, you're a nice enlightened man, get yourself into a relationship with a nice enlightened woman, and then you get punished for what other men do.
But it can be a double-edged sword if taken too far. Think about the transgender issue. What percentage of those Democrat-voting parents of transgender kids was happy when they discovered their "orientation?" Very close to zero. Some speak of it as if the kids has been diagnosed with some cancer, the parents are suffering but have to "be strong" to "be there" for the suffering child. And they tell themselves that every single generation of humans in history has had this problem and that they have to "accept" the new identity lest their children commit suicide. I think deep down many suspect it's more a social contagion than anything else, which is why they're so intent on making sure every child in America is exposed to the propaganda I mean enlightenment in the public schools. If we had checks on internal migration or rigid segregation such as separate school systems for Republicans or democrats, taking a pro-trans for eugenic reasons stance might be a good idea. But we don't, we only have one public school system, so it's a better strategy to stand and fight.
Rightists are afraid that those ideas will "poison" their children, so they dont want the memeplex released.
“For another thing, it assumes people in the future will produce exactly as much carbon as we do, which is almost certainly false.”
This is a key point Michael Crichton made in his great lecture, “Aliens Cause Global Warming.”
http://stephenschneider.stanford.edu/Publications/PDF_Papers/Crichton2003.pdf
Great lecture. I read it all.
I will have more to say later, but first a quick point.
First would per capita emission of carbon will certainly be lower in the future, but persons in less developed countries will almost certainly emit more.
People not having kids due to climate change (to the extent that its a genuine phenomenon) is likely to be seriously dysgenic. It's precisely the sort of people who would think along these lines, i.e. high IQ, conscientious, high future time orientation, who we need to be having more kids.
I will say though that population not mattering feels a bit misguided. Yes, we have a short period of time left to act to avert climate disaster and more kids doesn't impact that timeline, but its not 'set and forget'. What works now won't necessarily work 50 years down the line if the population continues expanding and more pressure if placed on net positive side of the carbon balance. If we get good at removing carbon from the atmosphere, the fewer people means more is done is actually reduce globally temperature rather than using that capacity to simply stop things getting worse. And of course, if we fail at reaching net zero or otherwise still face negative climate effects then the more people, the worse these effects will relatively be.
And I think we oughtn't focus narrowly on climate change but the environment generally. Even if we get emissions under control, there's still issues of water availability, soil degradation through increasingly large scale industrial agriculture required to support a huge population etc.
You are assuming that people who agree with you are particularly good people, possibly assuming that the argument for the position is obviously right. It isn't. Despite the current orthodoxy, it is not clear that climate change has net negative effects, there is very little reason to believe it has catastrophic effects, and there is no good reason to think that the policies that would be pushed by the people with these views will have desirable effects, even if they are correct in believing that climate change is a serious threat.
As I pointed out in another comment, one of the largest things the U.S. has done in response to political pressure to do something about climate is biofuels. It is now generally agreed that it doesn't actually reduce CO2 — Al Gore has conceded that, and admitted, to his credit, that part of the reason he supported it was he was running for president and Iowa has an early primary. What it has done is to raise the price of maize, thus getting political support from farmers, turn something like ten percent of the world crop of maize into alcohol, and so contributed to world hunger. The actual consequence of policies pushed by people who thought they were conscientious, high future time preference, etc. was to make a very large number of poor people somewhat poorer.
On your "short period of time," I don't know if you have been paying attention to the issue long enough to notice that for the past thirty years or so (I haven't checked the exact timing), authoritative figures — one of them was the "chief scientist" of Australia — have been announcing that we only have ten years to do something, after that it will be too late. I have not yet seen one of them, ten years later, saying that since it's now too late we should stop trying to do anything about the problem.
William Nordhaus, who got an econ Nobel for his work on the implications of climate change, had a piece in the NY Review of Books attacking a WSJ op-ed that had argued climate was not an emergency requiring rapid action. He gave his estimate of the net cost of doing nothing for fifty years, relative to doing the right things starting now. It was $4.1 trillion. He tried to make it sound like a large number, but for a cost spread over the entire globe and a century or so it works out to a small fraction of one percent of total GNP. For details, and a link to his piece, see:
http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2014/03/contra-nordhaus.html
> If we get good at removing carbon from the atmosphere,
In this scenario, humans have designed a carbon remover machine. The more humans, the more of these machines we can build.
It's been a long time since machine production was limited by human shortage, if ever: When desired number of machine increase when population increase (and in practice, it's almost always the case), it may even be a logical contradiction.
Number of qualified humans may be a factor (less and less so I think), but if your goal is to output more machines of type X, I don't think "making more babies" will make to your top-100 ways to reach this goal ;-)
Here and now, machine production seems to be limited by a shortage of truck drivers. And of high-end microchips, whose production is itself limited by the very small number of people and institutions that know how to make them.
"Yes, we have a short period of time left to act to avert climate disaster"
So we keep being told. But each time the supposed deadline is reached, we are given another one farther in the future.
As I have pointed out elsewhere in this discussion, William Nordhaus, arguing in favor of immediate action, estimated the cost of waiting fifty years to do anything relative to taking optimal action immediately at $4.1 trillion. He tried to make that sound large, but spread out over the globe and a century or so that's about 1/20th of one percent of global GNP.
The big advantage of waiting is that we gain information, which might tell us that there is nothing we should be doing, might tell us that we should be doing something, but not what us currently being urged, might tell us to do what is being urged, perhaps more of it.
The most uncharitable reading of the second argument is "We must produce more children to further our political goals". The most charitable is "We, the good people, should produce more people to add value to the world in future".
While I don't necessarily disagree with either, if these arguments become commonplace, I'm interested in the rabbitholes they produce in future.
"One way to think of this is to notice that we’ve already gotten about 25-30% of the global warming we’re likely to see by 2100."
This is true in terms of average temperature rise, but misleading in terms of impacts. Many outcomes are non-linear, so the last 0.1 degree of temperature increase (under whatever scenario) is associated with much more severe outcomes than the first 0.1.
I don't disagree with the conclusions of the post, but I think your response to the first point makes a mistake I see a lot: the idea that the most significant impacts of climate change are climate (hotter temperatures) and its immediate effects (weather, sea level).
In 2006-2011 Syria experienced the worst drought it had seen in decades. Impoverished and disaffected people streamed into cities as their farms and small communities collapsed. This led directly to the civil war, ISIS becoming a relevant terrorist threat, and a large chunk of migration from Syria to Europe. When I see the effects this one extreme weather event had on so much of the world (I would include the current rise of nationalism in Europe here), I wonder what the effects will be when 100 year floods / droughts / hurricanes are happening every 10 years, or even every year. Changes in wind patterns will change which areas and even nations are capable of supporting themselves through agriculture, which will then trigger similar effects. Millions of people don't starve to death without trying to take action.
If I were to pick the climate change consequences that most concern me, they would be war, terrorism, mass migration, rightwing backlash, and nuclear annihilation.
The latest IPCC report has a global map showing what regions they are moderately confident have above average levels of drought and what regions they are moderately confident (or very confident, but there aren't any, or have low confidence) have above average levels of drought because of climate change. There are only two regions out of about 45 which they are moderately confident have above average levels of drought due to climate change. One is western North America, where many of us live, and one is Med, which I assume means mediterranean. I'm not sure if that includes Syria or if that is in WCA, which I think means Western Central Asia, which has above average drought (medium confidence) but low confidence in human attribution.
In support of your worries, however, the IPCC does think that climate change in the future will increase agricultural and ecological drought, defined as low enough levels of water in the soil to reduce agricultural or ecological output. On the other hand, they don't seem to be paying attention to the fact that increased CO2 concentration decreases the need of plants for water, since they can get the carbon they need while passing less air through the leaves and so losing less water, which should to some degree reduce that problem.
If there are 100 reasonably independent areas on earth and we are tracking 10 climate variables (drought, floods, hurricanes, heat waves, etc.) then how many 100 year events will we see on average every year across the globe?
The existence of these events proves nothing other than there are extremes in climate, it is the global trend that matters. There are some regional trends that show changes but it must also be established that these rare events are caused by climate change and not just statistical anomalies that have always occurred.
IPCC AR5:
“In summary, the current assessment concludes that there is not enough evidence at present to suggest more than low confidence in a global-scale observed trend in drought or dryness (lack of rainfall) since the middle of the 20th century due to lack of direct observations, geographical inconsistencies in the trends, and dependencies of inferred trends on the index choice. Based on updated studies, AR4 conclusions regarding global increasing trends in drought since the 1970s were probably overstated. However, it is likely that the frequency and intensity of drought has increased in the Mediterranean and West Africa and decreased in central North America and north-west Australia since 1950”
Additionally many areas have sparse instrumental data from the past 100 years necessary to see small changes in outcomes. Syria is subject to droughts. The Middle East is subject to political instability. Connecting dots all the way to ISIS is quite a stretch. Hindcasting climate attribution of a specific event is basically cheating mathematically, tying this to political outcomes is even sketchier. If one is confident in their models they should be able to predict outcomes. This would be much more convincing. What do the same models forecast for Syria in the next 25 to 50 years?
Ultimately though Syria is better off by improving their resistance to droughts through infrastructure, not by buying solar panels and wind turbines in the USA. Regardless of this the past, present, and future political instability in the region is very likely not weather induced.
The idea was not to tie this specific disaster to climate change, which would be effectively impossible, but to point out extreme weather events can have major downstream effects which Scott left out of this article (though he mentions it in the follow-up).
I think the IPCC adjusts some of my priors, but there remains a body of evidence behind the risk of increased extreme events. I see the downstream effects of these events as the biggest downside of climate change.
Will bad outcomes occur? Probably in some form or another but they are going to be rather difficult to parse. For example per capita deaths from most climate events have been going down by almost an order of magnitude since 1900. This is due in part to better overall technology, better infrastructure, and in some cases climate change itself (e.g. less extreme cold events). Parsing out small dependencies with large background changes is always difficult. The trend towards fewer deaths is likely to continue. Things aren't getting worse in many categories, the argument really is they are not getting optimally better.
The trend of war deaths is down significantly during the era of climate change. Why is this not because of climate change? The eastern front in WWII might have been a bit more pleasant in 2020. You will find this pattern over and over. Only negative trends are tied to climate change and many of these observations are rather tenuous in nature. Many people actually think the food supply is decreasing because it is reported climate change is affecting crop yields. Careful reading shows the claim is actually that climate change is slowing down a pretty dramatic increase in crop yields over the past 100 years. Framing bias is rampant in day to day climate change coverage.
I think you are misunderstanding my point. It is not "look at these trends, causal relationship is left as an exercise for the reader". It is, put basically, large shifts in the status quo ripple through society in unpredictable ways, and the kinds of issues we expect to see from climate change have the potential to do so in a very negative way. War deaths could continue to trend downwards for the next 50 years, only to claim most of humanity due to nuclear war triggered, in part, by dramatic sociological changes brought about by climate change.
If we take global strife as the most pressing problem, this suggests that Facebook is a bigger disaster than global warming.
Mind you, I'm not necessarily disagreeing.
Too many comments.
Scott, are you thinking of having kids?
How sure are you that more CO2 in the atmosphere is a bad thing? It might be good. Maybe warming is holding back the next ice age. (Do climatologists understand what causes and stops an ice age?)
Technically, we are in an ice age and have been for several million years, an ice age being defined as a period with an ice cap on one or both poles. We are in an interglacial; what you are describing is a glaciation.
That said, I agree that the possibility that warming is keeping the current interglacial from ending should count as a very low probability/high cost risk of preventing warming. Estimates of the costs of climate change, in particular by Nordhaus, include low probability/high cost terms in the other direction, so should include that one.
Yeah, I'm all in favor of limiting carbon. But don't know how to do the math on the next ice age. (We need to convince enough people that nuclear is great, because sure there are byproduct/ left overs. But look how small and well contained they are compared to CO2. (And we may want to 'cook' them again in breeder reactors..)
"The data is quite clear that we are heading in the wrong direction on virtually all macro trends (not with respect to any particular historical benchmark, but with respect to the future in relationship to the present: is it going to be better)."
I must admit to being worried about the future too. Perhaps our worries differ. My take for whatever it is worth is that this is about the best life has ever been for humanity. But it is a lot easier going down than up.
Scott dismisses the effect of having fewer children. Here is a demonstration of the effect of low fertility.
>>Today, there are more than 2.2 billion children on Earth. Nearly two billion of these live in a developing country.<
https://www.humanium.org/en/children-world/
>>In 1960 we were 1 billion children below 15 years of age and we were 35% of the world population.
Now there are 1.9 billion children in the world, but they are but 27% of world population.<<
https://www.gapminder.org/news/world-peak-number-of-children-is-now/
Assumption: every generation of child-bearing age couples has an average of 1 child. (total fertility rate = 1.0) Generation = 30 years.
In other words: in and around 2050 2 billion child-bearing persons have approximately 1 billion kids (obviously not all in the same year). For simplicity these calculations assume that the TFT remains constant.
Now (2020): 2 billion kids
Gen 1 (2050): 1 billion kids
Gen 2 (2080): 500 million kids
Gen 3 (2110): 250 million kids
Gen 4 (2140): 125 million kids
Gen 5 (2170): 65 million kids
150 years from now 65 million children would be born. This is an extreme possibility to show the dramatic effect of low fertility.
Assuming 1.5 children per couple. This is a recent estimation of world TFT in 2100. Russia and 29 other countries already have a TFT of 1.5 or lower. 65 more countries are already below the replacement rate of 2.1.
Now (2020): 2 billion kids
Gen 1 (2050): 1.5 billion kids
Gen 2 (2080): 1.125 billion kids
Gen 3 (2110): 844 million kids
Gen 4 (2140): 633 million kids
Gen 5 (2170): 475 million kids
Half a billion children born in 2170 is a realistic rough estimate.
Why should fertility continue to decline? This is primarily an effect of urbanization. Continued increases in the urbanization of the Earth are quite likely.
I think Scott was perhaps using the kid-gloves in terms of pushing the point, but I'd think going down the road a bit further with the concept can be helpful.
If you don't have kids, then you and your ideas are already dead. A tiny handful of meaningful ideas, inventions, and the like pass through the generations through means other than descent, but broadly speaking every set of beliefs and ideas are able to be sustained through parenting and community.
It isn't just about voters or issues, it is your entire world view which dies with you unless you've passed it onto your children. As a conquerer of nations and ideas, one can simply ignore pretty much anything said by someone who says they plan on not having children. Whatever it is they want, think, say or do, it is extremely likely that will all die with them.
Several no-children cults have existed throughout history and aside from a handful of parasitic monastic orders which serve as de facto orphanages and school or provide some other useful function, they have all died out. A parasite cannot survive without the nourishment of the host organism. And any cult that is not a repository for discarded and abandoned people within a larger framework of child having peoples will inherently die out.
To both declare my ideas matter to me sooo much I'm willing to make incredible sacrifices, but then to also orchestrate a plan with a 0% success rate over time seems to be quite foolish. It is a strategy of defeat in a war of ideas where the propagation of largely ideas coincides with the propagation of people.
Truly the idea of 'no kids to solve xyz problem' is unrelated to 'climate change is a problem'. The climate change problem is a set of issues with a large number of possible solutions. So fixating upon a single approach for no good reason which has a 0% success rate over any period of time is approaching absurdity. The solution being to fail within a single generation trying to promote something almost no one will accept is no solution at all.
I think it is very important to parse these ideas as separate things in terms of identifying problems, solutions, tactics, approaches, efficacy, and palatability. As Scott says, even arguing this point is almost pointless since no more than a tiny sub 2% of people will ever entertain this idea or follow through with it across their lives.
Can everyone tolerate changes in unseen factory, farming, mining, energy generation, transportation and waste management processes which are already mostly invisible to them? Sure they can!
Truly all we need is a handful, perhaps a few tens of thousands of elites in positions of power to do things slightly differently, then problem solved. Instead of the 'impossible?' task of changing a few minds, we could somehow 're-educate' the entire world such that a meaningful number of people will have fewer children? What nonsense is this 'plan'? Even if births were slowed down by 10% or something....climate change will still 'destroy the world' over say 300 years instead of 200 years if nothing else changes.
And if other things can change like new farming practices or not-so-new technologies like solar power...why not just speed that up a bit and people can make money along the way rather than trying to push a deeply deeeply unpopular idea of getting people not to have children?
"It isn't just about voters or issues, it is your entire world view which dies with you unless you've passed it onto your children. "
Karl Marx? Adam Smith? David Hume? John Stuart Mill? George Bernard Shaw? G.K. Chesterton? Ayn Rand?
Mostly didn't have children, passed their world view on in a more effective way.
If you're a one-in-a-million apex-tier intellectual, sure, maybe. That doesn't make this a viable strategy for maintaining cultural assets for the average person, not to mention genetic inheritance.
I’d go much farther: people smart and conscientious enough to read this article have a moral duty to have children, given the heritability of those traits: https://quillette.com/2017/02/02/if-youre-reading-this-essay-you-should-probably-have-more-children/
I'd broadly agree with the above, as well as the argument that human ingenuity can in principle vastly expand the resources available for our use, though I also think people are being too hard on Malthus et al- the man was basically right for 99% of human history and continued to be right for large chunks of Africa during the 60s/70s/80s. (Norman Borlaug, who did more to avert the consequences of the population bomb than perhaps any other individual in history, also never dismissed population growth as some irrelevant hangup.)
I also think techno-libertarians can be a little blasé about the idea that sufficiently advanced technology means we'll simply never had to worry about population growth in future- 5% growth per annum would exhaust the available resources of the solar system in less than a thousand years. And by that I mean the combined mass of human beings would exceed the combined mass of the solar system, including the sun.
Zeroing in on climate change is missing the mark. "Climate change" is just a stand-in for a more amorphous sense that the world is getting worse.
There is more cynicism and uncertainty about the future for 100s of reasons. Employment is increasingly precarious and lower paid, housing is expensive, the government is a failure, we are still in the middle of a global pandemic. Every institution has failed, badly. COVID could've been handled 10x better in the West, but it wasn't. The Fed seemingly did what they always do - bailed out the rich via low interest rates. Every city I've worked/lived in has become more of a ghost town - rents keep rising, almost everyone gets driven out, businesses shut down and good luck meeting people in that environment.
My sense is anyone's answer to "do I want kids?" is a function of 1. how stable and secure they feel their life is now 2. how optimistic they are about the future. Just looking at those questions from a financial POV, most of us don't make it. Add on all the other bullshit, its hard to find reasons to be optimistic today. The world simply can't support the level of population we have today at reasonable living standards - even if it can at a fundamental, technological/scientific level, it certainly is failing to do so because of political factors. Why would anyone bring a kid in to that world?
I've sometimes wondered if climate change is being pumped up as a big spooky doomsday scenario to provide a left-wing-palatable scapegoat for other social disasters, but I suppose Scott would call that a little too cynical.
The topic of *why* birthrates are declining so precipitously is complicated and I don't mean to be unsympathetic to those in a genuinely precarious economic situation, but I'm always a little skeptical of economic hardship as being a reliable monocausal explanation for a lack of children. There's generally a very robust inverse correlation between fertility and income within any given country- the people who can most afford to have children are having few or none, and the people who can least afford to have children are having the most.
I have a suspicion that if you took the tax breaks and legal perks currently associated with marriage and applied them to the status of marriage-with-children, birthrates might perk up somewhat. Particularly if you applied a higher tax rate to the childless and used the revenue for pro-natal subsidies. But I guess packaging that up politically would be a challenge. But in theory the idea would be to shift children from being an economic and reputational liability back to being an economic and reputational asset, as they would have been in Ye Olden Dayes.
politically, just have the american right wing dump the fusionist ideology and go Hungary/Russia in their policies towards family formation. Trump's reign does show tht the "small government" stuff is in many ways a mask and more active state-policies pursued by Bannon or whatnot to improve family formation can be pushed within an overton window.
Sorry, I just googled 'fusionism' to get some idea of what you were talking about- yeah, I can broadly agree that the GOP alliance with libertarian business elites has been a marriage of convenience where the social conservatives don't seem to be conserving much of anything. I think the association of small-government capitalism with conservatism was largely an accident of history due to the US being founded as a radical enlightenment project by the standards of it's time- capitalism itself as a driver of technological growth and innovation tends to erode social stability, for better or for worse.
That said, I'm not convinced that active-state policies in the same vein as Hungary and Russia have yielded a large impact on birthrates as of yet (and for a lot of these countries it's probably too late.)
Once we deal with the Ponzi scheme nature of our social security system, a smaller population will provide many benefits to our country. Couples in North America and Europe have already voluntarily decided to reduce their births below replacement levels and if other nations are prevented from dumping their excess population on those areas maybe they will too. Young people will have less competition for jobs and higher wages and will pay far less for housing. We will have a chance to slow climate change and wildlife habitat will be protected from urban sprawl giving threatened species a chance to survive. The benefits are many and varied.
Actually, the retirement crisis in the United States is likely to be relatively mild compared to similar problems with boomers exiting the workforce in Europe, China and Korea, precisely because US birthrates have been relatively high (and supplemented with migration), whereas low birthrates in most of the rest of the OECD has created a top-heavy demographic pyramid where a steadily shrinking pool of working youngsters have to look after ageing retirees, which increases the burden of taxation and pressure on the health system. Obviously there are risks associated with overpopulation when fertility rates are too high, but if resources are not seriously constrained (and in the developed world they are not), then low birthrates make life harder for the young, not easier.
Peter Zeihan covers the topic in some detail here.
https://youtu.be/b1IJ9kqBilE?t=380
This might just be me howling into the void, but Peter Zeihan has outlined how declining birthrates have been/are likely to be a major contributor to economic stagnation/decline collapse in the coming decades (I personally reckon that radical advances in automation/longevity might be the only counter to this, but who knows.) Hopefully Scott might get a chance to read Disunited Nations and bring the problem to wider attention.
Having children is unethical although I don't think the impending climate apocalypse makes it notably less ethical. Still being in the 1% of people worldwide materially is meaningless, the question is simply is anyone better off living? The answer is no.
Fellow Substacker Bari Weiss enters the conversation (via Suzy):
"Who would want to bring new, innocent life into a criminally unequal society situated on a planet with catastrophically rising sea levels?"
https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/first-comes-love-then-comes-sterilization
And adds the extreme version of the commitment to this belief system: voluntary sterilization.
This updates the list of ways progressives are eliminating themselves from the gene pool that I started in another comment: sex strikes (a bit silly, but still notable) , same-sex relationships, climate celibacy (loosely the topic here), abortion, transgenderism, sterilization.
Some merely reduce the odds of reproduction, others ensure reproduction cannot ever happen. Whatever the case, it seems to me like progressives are aggressively pushing 'selection' away from themselves, ensuring future Americans will be less progressive.
How big of an effect this will have I do not know. Weiss offers some statistics on births, deaths and celibacy. I wonder if anyone has done an ideological/political analysis of this type of data? For instance, "the number of deaths exceeded that of births in 25 states," Weiss writes. Are those blue states? Purple states? Red states? Etc.
Political progressivism follows the same trend as IQ scores: at a genetic level it's probably being slowly eroded by fertility differences but cultural/environmental factors will probably make up the difference on short-to-medium timescales.
This is part of why I keep saying that the future will either be transhuman or conservative. Barring wide-scale adoption of gene-editing biotech to enhance longevity and upgrade other human attributes, over long timescales fertility differences are ultimately going to hand total demographic victory to conservatism, with the largest advantage going to paleoconservatives like the hutterites, hasidism, and certain muslim groups. A planetary cage match between those contenders would not be fun to witness, but as long as the modern world keeps inducing smart, tolerant, creative, open-minded and altruistic people to commit genetic suicide, this is what you can ultimately look forward to.
I was generally in agreement until you implied “smart, tolerant, creative, open-minded and altruistic” were qualities that are mutually exclusive with politic and religious conservatism. Did you mean to suggest that, say, Hasidic Jews or devout Muslims cannot be smart or creative?
Yeah, perhaps that's a little simplistic. Obviously there's a lot of individual variation.
I would suspect, however, that smart and creative people born into hasidic/muslim families are more likely to get sucked into the higher education pipeline and then get absorbed into progressive culture.
That’s an interesting point. I suppose that’s right for Muslims in America these days. But I believe Hasida have their own schools. Thanks for the engagement!
No worries. The point about altruism can be debated as well I suppose- having 7 kids per family may be excessive, but sacrificing a significant chunk of your freedom and income to bring children into the world can be argued to be an act of altruism, at least in moderation, and religious conservatives are more likely to do this.
This is why I have a certain sympathy for the conservative wing of the political spectrum. For all their other foibles and bad habits, they are pulling their weight in a way that liberals are fundamentally not doing.
The sea level estimates of IPCC are very conservative, they are not a good example to hold unfortunately. The glacier melting can be extremely nonlinear, like popping the cork from a wine bottle. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPBzUVsJqm4
How is it possible for a baby to produce a ton of anything in a year? It would have to produce over six pounds every second! It is, further, idiotic to claim that people in the distant future, who don't even exist now, can produce anything at all this year. And this year, or now, is all that we can effect or that can effect us, or the world, now.
There is nothing remotely true about catastrophic earth 'sciences.' Shut up and let me enjoy my 440 CI blown hemi at full throttle.
I have to comment that the hiveminded congratulatory response to this rinky dink STEM guy piece is not justified.
This stream of bald assertions:
>Climate change will cause worse hurricanes, fires, and other disasters. It will lead to increased spread of invasive species and diseases. It will hit subsistence farmers in poor agricultural countries very hard, and some of them will starve or become refugees. But it won’t cause the collapse of civilization. It won’t kill everyone. Life in the First World will continue, with worse weather and maybe a weaker economy, but more or less the same as always. The people who say otherwise are going against the majority of climatologists, climate models, and international bodies.
…is not supported by the linked article, whose primary argument is that climate change will be "devastating", just not existential (i.e., causing the death of every human and all humanity), or by any argument or evidence in your piece. A handful of decontextualized maps and a handwaving aside about how millions of citizens in low lying cities can "just move" as if this is not a massive disturbance to a delicate cultural geographical order are fascinating exhibits of such lack of empathy and imprudence as to border on the hypermasculine.
You offer in the comments that defaulting to the authority of the IPCC in your post is all you need to do to convince scared potential parents (in lieu of being correct, I suppose) since they presumably believe the IPCC to found their fears, but if we take our mission-minded sophist hats and replace them with critical thinker hats, we have to wonder whether the nuclear implications of millions of refugees spilling into increasingly fragile democracies to add to explosive conflicts erupting today is something a panel of climate scientists can really relieve us of.
I do not think you've made your argument.
i cannot believe how many comments are on this post. wow, is this the most commented piece on substack?
no, it's the ivermectin one, of course
> If you think privileged modern Americans shouldn’t have children now because of quality-of-life issues, you implicitly believe that nobody in the Third World, or nobody before 1900, should ever have had children.
It doesn't imply that at all. There's nothing inconsistent or hypocritical about someone basing this decision on what THEY consider a good life right here and now, and not on what someone else thought was a good life before 1900, or what someone else thinks is a good life thousands of miles away. If someone has kids, they're going to be THEIR kids, not someone else's. If someone in the 1800s thought the world was nice enough for their kids to live in, I believe them, but that is irrelevant to anybody else's situation and doesn't imply that anybody else has to be satisfied with that for their own children.
And either way, most people don't want their children's lives to merely be good, they want their children's lives to be at least as good as or better than their own lives.
Besides, people in the Third World, or before 1900, broadly speaking don't "choose" to have kids in the same way that present-day people in the First World do.
wow you suck at writing.