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.
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.