The article gives the example of us deciding how much we should pay as a society to reduce the number of road deaths. Do we count only the lives of the people who would otherwise die in the accidents? Or do we also count the lives of the children that they might have?
Valuing descendants gets you to weird conclusions pretty quickly: preventing the death of someone in a culture where people typically have large numbers of children would seem much more important than saving the life of someone past childbearing age as you consider the exponential increase in descendents over time.
Similarly, there are likely a lot of ways that you could increase the number of children born other than by preventing the deaths of their would-be parents. Policies that made housing, childcare, and education cheaper could have a very large impact -- I know a lot of people who have decided to have fewer kids than they otherwise would have because of the cost.
Even more dramatically, consider policies that have an effect on whether humanity continues to exist. If we wipe ourselves out with nukes, bioengineering, etc, that's a lot of potential future people who won't get to exist in addition to all of the current people who would die.
I think Toby Ord's "The Precipice" has a pretty good treatment of these issues, and is very thorough.
Even if you limit yourself to considering only currently living humans, calculating the cost of preventing deaths is almost universally avoided by government policy makers of any sort.
Even worse is considering the cost per healthy life year. It's very rare to find any policy maker even willing to discuss this. One that have seen is Britain's NHS, who will spend £20,000 - £30,000 to give cancer patients 1 extra "Quality adjusted life year"[1]. But this is only used to compare drug prices and never mentioned even in the context of other UK government health interventions, which might have a much higher cost (e.g. COVID measures which might have cost 100x more per Qaly) or much lower (e.g. teen mental health might cost 100x less per Qaly). And that's just discussing health care inside a single country. The cost per Qaly of foreign aid to areas experiencing famine might be 10,000x lower than other policies.
This is a can of worms, for sure. But we must facilitate and celebrate childbearing as a society. We’ve been able to do it in previous generations. But recently our priorities lie elsewhere: careers, money, status. When the worth of an individual is measured by how much money they make, children take a back seat. Read into that what you will, but we are not headed the right direction.
Given our demonstrated inability to act as responsible stewards for the limited resources available to us on this planet—not to mention one another in the face of this scarcity—perhaps we would stand a better chance of being a healthier and happier society as a population of 700 million rather than 7 billion?
To be clear, I understand that getting there will be undeniably painful given our economic systems’ expectations of and reliance upon indefinite and unlimited growth. But such an outcome may be unavoidable in any case and it’s one I’d rather see us plan for and soften the impact of than continue to rush blindly into.
I just don’t believe any more that the Earth can support the number of people we have at anything vaguely shaped like a modern Western lifestyle for much longer. We can and should continue to try to reduce our rate of consumption. But we’re too big at this point to have many good solutions left. I mean, for fuck’s sake, we’re running out of usable sand.
I decided to have children early, my first at 25 and I tapped out at 3. I would have been happy with less, God knows how much easier my life would be if I didn't have to deal with that part of life. Maybe I would have continued my postdoc longer, wouldn't have to worry about buying a house big enough, and being tied down.
Most people say kids are worth it, and it teaches you something about yourself, and that's certainly true. It's not a requirement though to have that appreciation, but I think there is actual utility to bringing healthy adjusted kids into the worth. Maybe we will reach some sort of grand equilibrium in the future with everyone having exactly 2 kids (more likely we go down a different path before then), but now is not that time. We have a lot of challenges, and unless people actually make the sacrifices and try and raise kids better than themselves, they're going to be better adapted to the future world than we are.
I find the idea of an an aribritrary population limit kinda dark. Why stop at 700 million? Maybe just one atomic family (though that would be biblically fucked up), maybe a small town of 2000 would make more sense, add in a few for redundancy, more than enough sand to go around, we'll just run the whole thing. Getting down to 700 million you realize would entail forced castration for almost everyone, are you imagining some dystopian society where we castrate and separate into breeders? I just don't see how your solution is at all plausible in the first place. I'm sure we have 700 million people alive no now under 20. So what's the plan, create a political party?
Pretty much any country that approaches development and has equal rights for women leads to a birth rate bellow replacement level. You don't need to castrate anyone, you give women education, birth control, require dual incomes to effectively survive as a family unit, equal rights and an (semi-)urban lifestyle and it pretty much shakes out to that automatically. Eventually the issue will be to have enough children, and an economic model that that can deal with shrinking old populations without horrific consequences.
> I find the idea of an an aribritrary population limit kinda dark. Why stop at 700 million?
I’m not advocating for that number as a limit. I’m proposing we consider that a smaller population in general may be a good thing over the long run. A factor of ten was simply an easy value to reach for to jumpstart a discussion.
There is no need to specifically pursue this policy: it works out this way economically anyway. As it getting harder and less convenient to have children, populations growth slows down. If there will be time of prosperity ahead, it will pick up.
This would definity create some issues if the change would be fast but also there would be some possitive side effects where it would solve few problems, e.g. if population over time decreases by 50% suddenly current real estates problems would be much easier to solve.
Real estate is not really a space problem; we have a lot of nice, uninhabited land all over the globe. The problem is that people want to live near denser areas for various reasons and reducing the world population will (probably) only reduce the number of dense areas, but not the housing problem within them.
I suspect these two problems are not as unrelated as they initially seem. My criticism is of modern western lifestyle where value is the unit dollar. I fully agree with your premise. But I’m not sure I feel good about the answer being “population regulation” (which has it’s own implementation issues). There has to be another way…
I’m not suggesting we cap the number of children. I’m saying that it’s maybe not a bad thing in the long run if more and more people choose not to have kids (or choose to have fewer).
To put it callously, old people can't work much and consume lots of resources, so a plague that kills them off (however sad) actually makes life easier for everyone else.
But lower fertility rates have the opposite effect, the ratio of old people to young people increases, which is why it makes things harder.
There's a good chance AI and robotics can replace a big portion of human workforce. If that happens, then the high ratio of old people to young is no longer a problem.
Did previous generations truly facilitate and prioritize childbearing over other alternatives (careers, money, status, etc) or was it simply that women didn't really have those alternatives and so had children by default? Men have always had the opportunity to pursue both their careers and have children because women put children before a career. For a long time that was due to the very limited career options available to women, and the inertia and assumptions that led to have persisted until very recently.
So I don't think the solution is to look to previous generations, because they didn't facilitate childbearing so much as they restricted other paths for women to at least some degree. Traditionalists might argue women were fine with that arrangement, but it seems noteworthy that women jumped at the opportunity to pursue other paths. Which means if we want to increase fertility rates again, it probably means we need to do something new, that doesn't present having children and having a career as mutually exclusive.
The problem is that many progressives don’t see raising children and making a home as having a career. I’m not advocating that we delete progress and steal careers and opportunities from women. Rather, it should be a socially acceptable option to be a homemaker (regardless of your gender). But this intense push to have dual income households and 50:50 women:men STEM ratios seems absurdly unrealistic to me when you factor in biology and humanity. Furthermore, who’s going to perform childcare in a society where caring for children is not a respectable pursuit? Who’s going to care for power couples‘ kids without income inequality? Robots?
I think the way you spin history is somewhat unfair to men. A “career” is not an “opportunity” to most men I know. It’s a requirement. It’s long hard days of stress and labor. Some of us are lucky and rather enjoy our labor, but it’s labor nonetheless. Just like making a home. You say women were restricted, and certainly that was true for certain paths, but I also suspect previous generations enjoyed societies where women were happy in large part because they were not being told that they needed to be like the men to be happy/valuable. Personally, I would adore the opportunity to be a homemaker, but alas that opportunity is not available to me. It cuts both ways.
Anyway, my main point is, irrespective of gender, dual income households are not a positive status quo and it sucks trying to plan a family around two people needing to work. It’s not fair to children who deserve more attention than day care. And it’s not fair to all the homemakers out there who are honestly some of the most valuable people we have. And importantly, it doesn't achieve the replacement rate so it’s ultimately a losing strategy details be damned. We need to figure out how to affirmatively value homemaking so it can be regarded on the same level as a career. And I suspect if we can do that, birthrates will go up.
> But we must facilitate and celebrate childbearing as a society.
I know this is unpopular, but just an opinion without facts, and I strongly disagree. This agreed "it must be that way" is one of our main problems and turning this planet over, we should reconsider.
It's survivorship bias—where bias means skewed from the full distribution of choices people and societies made, not bias as in discrimination.
Most of the families and societies that didn't prioritize population growth (by reproduction or immigration) aren't around to advocate for that approach's merits, whereas those that did are.
Fun fact: for each human alive today there've been 15 deceased humans ever. As zombie apocalypses go, 15:1 doesn't sound too bad.
Women are increasingly uninterested in child-bearing as it comes with significant opportunity cost and decrease in the status quo quality of life. This is an unavoidable fact. Trying to make it more palatable is not going to work.
My argument is that we need to fix that mentality because it’s poisonous. We can’t both 1. exist, and 2. have a society where bearing children is seen as a huge opportunity cost and decrease in quality if life. We will all die.
This explicitly implies that population growth is desired. However, our total resources are limited, and at some point growing population is unsustainable.
It can be argued that some countries are already at this point. Ie they have stagnant population numbers because they are already over-populated, and there is economic pressure to reduce population growth.
"at some point growing population is unsustainable"
This is a logical fallacy that has been bounced around, in catastrophic terms, for centuries. (see Thomas Malthus [1], "The Population Bomb" by Ehrlich [2], etc.) Ehrlich went as far to say that in the 1970s, HUNDREDS of millions of people would starve. Did that happen? No. These ideas about some theoretical limit on food or resources of the Earth are alarmist and do not benefit the public discourse.
Sure, maybe the Earth has a limit to how much population it can support, but it could easily be 100 billion. Who knows? Do you know that the entire population of the Earth can fit in an area the size of the state of Texas, in single family homes? [3]
In contrast to the disproven "unsustainable growing population" idea, depopulation and the aging of the population will have severe consequences within the next few decades, and already has had negative consequences in places like Japan [4], Italy [5], and many others.
We definitely need to deploy policies to increase the number of births to address these issues.
The fact that the malthusian catastrophe has not yet occured does not discredit it. In fact this can be explained by agricultural yield gains that were substantial in the first half of the 20th century, thanks to using hybridized cultivars and industrial fertilizers and pesticides. Where will the gains be in the future when we approach another resource limit? We will have to continue to use genetic modification to improve our crop yields, and these days marketing executives have poisoned that word in the minds of many who now seek out gmo free foods specifically. This is also to say nothing about the state of the environment, how we take out elemental resources from the land that took a very long time to deposit in this place, bring them to a distant market and never replace them, diminishing the fertility of the area. Or how we do the opposite to our aquatic environments through eutrophication.
The idea that technology will always bail us out seems foolish to rely upon in the grand scheme, eventually the disequilibriums we create in these environments we exploit will be too extreme to successfully manage and maintain a system as complex as a local ecology. These disequilibriums are already extreme in many places and policy makers rarely seem to care unless some stakeholder is set to see a profit.
>The idea that technology will always bail us out seems foolish to rely upon in the grand scheme, eventually the disequilibriums we create in these environments we exploit will be too extreme to successfully manage and maintain a system as complex as a local ecology. These disequilibriums are already extreme in many places and policy makers rarely seem to care unless some stakeholder is set to see a profit.
Your assumption that technology may not be capable of helping us enormously down the road is much more of an assumption than the pro-technology argument. Because unlike the anti-growth malthusian argument, the reality so far for centuries has been that technology did indeed make life easier and better for people despite an ever growing population.
There's actual, consistent precedent contradicting all malthusian predictions across several centuries of human development, with entirely artificial political disasters mostly being responsible for any failures. On the other hand, we've not yet seen any concrete examples of human development failing in the face of hard natural limits to growth. Wherever it has failed has been because of mismanagement in some form or another, not lack of possible solutions.
It did indeed make life better but thats because we never considered the externalities, then we would realized we erred too hard on the side of environmental exploitation. What takes millions of years of give and take to produce is squandered in a fortnight.
In biology, balanced relationships, mutually symbiotic relationships take orders of magnitude longer to evolve than parasitic relationships. We do not have a balanced relationship with this planet, we have a parasitic one. We are speaking the same things when you say that whenever we have failed was because of mismanagement, in other words being to parasitic to our hosts. To not mismanage something would be to understand all the latent variables affecting the system before we act. We never do that, we act, then only react after the system is so obviously affected by our actions.
Thank you, I could not have stated it better myself. When there are many real-life examples that contradict an idea, and only theories and logic that stem from certain questionable assumptions to support that idea, then at very least it is a very poor idea on which to base public policy
I don't know if 1000 square feet per person is the exact same as people living in single family homes as it wouldn't include roads, farms, retail or any of the other spaces you would need, it's just 268,581 square miles divided between 7 billion people.
Population growth has overall largely been a function of increased energy availability, from the industrial revolution onward through the consumption of fossil fuels which are inherently unsustainable.[1]
Also, assuming the number is for example 100 billion, it seems like you still have the same issue of infinite population growth being inherently unsustainable but just on a different timescale.
You need to look at the fact that our rate of population growth is negative. Sperm counts are averaging around 40 mill which is enough to require medical assistance. The human race is, in fact past peak growth and declining.
So our second derivative is negative. It is fundamentally unsustainable for anything else to be the case forever, right? That would imply linear or greater growth in perpetuity on a finite planet where we and our livestock already comprise 96% of all mammal biomass.
The drop in sperm count is of course concerning, though if we can't get our act together on birth control and family planning then it's probably one of the least tragic ways for our population to get knocked down to a more sustainable level. Humans generally fail at prisoner's dilemma ("if we have fewer babies, other nations will overtake us!"), so it seems necessary that some outside force eventually mitigate our continual failure there--and again, when compared to mass wars or starvation, a lower fertility rate is actually a pretty peaceful course-correction, so long as it doesn't plummet too low.
We largely have gotten our act together on family planning, which is why birth rates are below replacement everywhere but sub-Saharan Africa, and dripping there too. Only reason population is still increasing is a combination of lag (it takes the smaller year groups now growing up in India and China to become adults before those countries will tip into population decline (excluding immigration), and waiting for the decline in Africa to hit replacement as well.
UN projections indicate somewhere around the end of the century for a net reduction in people, but long before that we'll see developed countries starting to compete agressively for immigrants, combined with campaigns to push fertility up to try for a soft landing.
> Do we count only the lives of the people who would otherwise die in the accidents? Or do we also count the lives of the children that they might have?
You never account for potential people because it inevitably leads to so-called repugnant conclusions that causes involuntary suffering among some number of currently existing people in order to secure some hypothetical good outcome for some set of hypothetical future people. People can voluntarily make such sacrifices, as parents do for their children, but this sort of argument should never be compulsory as with government policy.
> Even more dramatically, consider policies that have an effect on whether humanity continues to exist. If we wipe ourselves out with nukes, bioengineering, etc, that's a lot of potential future people
But more importantly, this impacts all current people and the things they value. What existing people want and value should always take precedence over hypothetical people, if only because their values may be entirely different than your own.
> You never account for potential people ... to secure some hypothetical good outcome for some set of hypothetical future people ... this sort of argument should never be compulsory as with government policy.
To extend the analogy I made in my reply to kazinator above [1], imagine that in 1900 someone invented a technology that had some kind of benefits to the users, but would make the earth uninhabitable in 2050. Kind of like an even more extreme version of climate change. I think you're saying it would have been wrong for governments to prohibit using this technology, because the only beneficiaries didn't yet exist?
Alternatively, would a government policy that tried to reduce the incidence of fetal alcohol syndrome be unacceptable on the grounds that the people who are less likely to be born with FAS don't exist yet?
> But more importantly, this impacts all current people and the things they value.
Yes, but it affects prioritization. For example, imagine that $10B could either avert 2M deaths from malaria or reduce the risk of us human extinction in the next 20 years by 0.1 percentage points (averting 8B * 0.1% = 0.8M deaths now). If you only care about currently living people then you'd likely prefer the former, where if you also put some weight on future people you might prefer the latter.
> imagine that in 1900 someone invented a technology that had some kind of benefits to the users, but would make the earth uninhabitable in 205
Anything on that short a timescale would have negative effects on the existing population or their immediate descendants, which still falls under looking after the wishes of those who exist.
Your thought experiment is asserting that we can separate future negative effects from present negative effects, but I mostly reject that assertion.
Take climate change. You might argue that continued fossil fuel use is useful for people now and only really impacts hypothetical future people. However, pollution clearly affects people's health now, not to mention the death toll of the endless wars over oil.
I think the closest possible exceptions I can think of are maybe existential threats to humanity that have lots of uncertainty, like an asteroid or maybe AI. But even here, an asteroid could literally, suddenly be a threat in the next few years, and a similar argument can be made that AI could easily become dangerous within our lifetime given the pace of development, so these still impact those who exist now. These are hypothetical threats to existing people, not threats to hypothetical people.
> would a government policy that tried to reduce the incidence of fetal alcohol syndrome be unacceptable on the grounds that the people who are less likely to be born with FAS don't exist yet?
No, because the parents of those children exist now, and they don't want those outcomes.
> Anything on that short a timescale would have negative effects on the existing population or their immediate descendants, which still falls under looking after the wishes of those who exist. ... the parents of those children exist now, and they don't want those outcomes.
I don't understand your pivot here to include anything that current people prefer. If you're comfortable with work to support the wishes of those who exist, what about the large number of people who want humanity to continue flourishing well after they're dead?
Trying to narrow down the hypothetical, I think your asteroid suggestion is a good one. If on 1950-01-01 we had discovered a huge asteroid on course to collide with Earth on 2100-01-01, "let's ignore this until the people who are going to be alive on that day have been born" would have been a (rightly!) unpopular decision.
> I know a lot of people who have decided to have fewer kids than they otherwise would have because of the cost.
How many? Nobody I know has done this with an actual spreadsheet of cost per child.
What I see instead (in my professional friend circles) is people keep putting off having kids until their mid thirties because they end up so focused on their career. Then biology just makes is statistically much less likely to have lots of kids.
So it’s not really, “we didn’t have our 3rd because I didn’t get that promotion.” Instead it’s, “we didn’t have kids until we had advanced careers because society for the past 3 decades said anything else was irresponsible.”
Most of the people I know with kids would have had more if it wasn't so finances-wreckingly expensive. My wife and I would have had at least one more in that case, certainly.
The ones who have no kids and don't want any—I don't know any of those for whom it would have made a difference, though.
> What I see instead (in my professional friend circles) is people keep putting off having kids until their mid thirties because they end up so focused on their career.
Some of them are doing this because having kids is so expensive. It doesn't seem possible to provide adequately for them without mid-career income (often two mid-career incomes).
People with kids I know did not expressed that sentiment. I have heard some of them say that their actual number of kids is enough.
The thing here is that people tend to be more comfortable expressing deeply private thoughts about kids only to those who they suspect have similar outlook.
> How many? Nobody I know has done this with an actual spreadsheet of cost per child.
Everyone I know has done this with a spreadsheet of cost per child.
Around abouts where I live, the cost is 40k+ per year per child, not counting the obscene amount of $ you need to spend for a house that has room for more than 1 child, that is going to cost you well over a million, and if you want it in an area with good schools, you are looking at nearly 2 million.
So yeah, people here do the calculation, because not everyone can afford to dump 2 million on a house so they can have a second child.
Have a kid in California and you can look forward to paying $17000/year for infant care [1]. With California's median per-capita income of $41000/year [2] having two kids is an expensive business!
Presumably you aren't constantly growing and in constant need of new clothes, nor do you need to pay someone to look after you on a day to day basis a la childcare.
Nobody needs to dump 2 million on a house in the Bay Area to have kids. Whoever is running that calculation is deluding themselves and just wants to make absolutely no lifestyle sacrifice for another kid.
Those numbers are the yuppie calculations that you get when neither adult wants to stop living in one of the most expensive parts of town and neither wants to be a stay at home parent even part time.
The cost is not 40k per year per child. Re-run the numbers using public schools and having a stay at home parent with no more than a few hours a week of childcare.
> The cost is not 40k per year per child. Re-run the numbers using public schools and having a stay at home parent with no more than a few hours a week of childcare.
Why stay at home parent, that is absurd now days.
> and neither wants to be a stay at home parent even part time.
People want a retirement plan, and that means working and contributing to a 401k. If my wife stopped working, well for one the childcare savings wouldn't be enough to make up for lost income, and two, our retirement plans would be shot to pieces.
Fwiw I'm in Seattle, if you want to go to good public schools, houses cost a lot more. House price here is highly correlated with the quality of the local schools. Want to go to the best schools in the area? Looking at moving outside Seattle to Bellevue, and an old house in the area with the best public schools will reach almost 2 million.
House prices around there have nearly doubled in the past 3 year.
I'm only in an area with slightly above average schools, so a 4 bedroom house here is 1.2-1.5 million. Although since Seattle schools just cancelled their gifted program, parents with smart kids now have to pay for private schools, so shove those costs on top of whatever is saved by moving to Seattle proper instead of one of the more expensive suburbs.
There are not fancy new houses, these are "whatever house is for sale that has the right number of bedrooms" and are often quite old.
These calculations are absurdly subjective and based on some sort of very unusually defined notion of costs per child. In the country I live in (and in many others i'm sure) millions of people manage to raise perfectly healthy kids wonderfully without earning or spending anywhere near those amounts per child or for a home. 2 million for a home fit for two kids? Ridiculous.
Child care is 24k-30k a year, with wait lists that can exceed a year. Parents don't have a choice, if they are lucky enough to get a daycare spot they have to take it wherever it is at.
Gas in Seattle is still around $4.60 a gallon, nearly $1 more per gallon than outside the city.
> 2 million for a home fit for two kids?
A 70yr old home in an above average neighborhood, with 3 bedrooms, costs 1.2 million. If you want that house in an area with highly ranked public schools, you will be approaching 2 million. If you want 4 bedrooms (home office if your company does wfh), add another 200-300k. For the areas with the best public schools, you'll need to go to a neighboring city and those houses can easily reach 2 million, home prices near the nicest schools have nearly doubled in the last 3 years.
A note about schools here, the school you go to is based on where you live, and schools are funded with property taxes. This means more expensive neighborhoods have better schools. In some schools the pipes still have lead in them and the water is unsafe to drink. The city does not have enough money to fund the schools and as such even has repeatedly cut programs as schools are ran in a shoestring budget year after year.
Because of this there is a lot of competition between parents to buy houses in nicer neighborhoods, which dramatically increases home prices.
Congratulations on having exceptionally high personal living standards while residing in the 7th most expensive U.S city. You represent a miniscule fraction of the world's population. Now of course, this doesn't mean you should base your standards on how hundreds of millions of other families with one or more children manage to live okay in the rest of the world, but I note that even in Seattle itself, there are 110,672 children under the age of 18 and I guarantee you that the parents of only a small fraction of these kids own a 2 million-dollar home or pay 30 grand per year in childcare expenses.
Again, many, many people raise children quite well and responsibly without needing anywhere near $2 million to have a couple of them.
> but I note that even in Seattle itself, there are 110,672 children under the age of 18 and I guarantee you that the parents of only a small fraction of these kids own a 2 million-dollar home or pay 30 grand per year in childcare expenses.
Of course not, 5 years ago houses were much more affordable.
10 years ago they were massively more affordable.
Now they are not.
> Again, many, many people raise children quite well and responsibly without needing anywhere near $2 million to have a couple of them.
You can get a 4 bedroom house in a not so great part of town for under 1 million, but even an 800k house in a crap area is hardly "affordable". Houses around good schools, aka ones with drinking water not contaminated with lead (which is an actual fucking problem in Seattle schools), cost a lot more. Houses in cheaper areas also have schools where, pulling from state test scores, less than 30% of children in local schools learn how to read. So if that matters to parents, they may want to look elsewhere for housing.
Prior to starting school, child care in Seattle for 2 kids is still going to run 44-60k a year. When they do start public school, count on expensive summer programs, and during the school year, expensive after school sports.
> Congratulations on having exceptionally high personal living standards while residing in the 7th most expensive U.S city.
When I was born here, this was a very affordable city. When I went to public schools here, they were good. Funding was still piss poor, and presumably we were all drinking leaded water without knowing about it (and again, everyone responsible for that still being a problem should be thrown in a jail cell for awhile), but the education outcomes were good. Heck I got to play with recombinant DNA in high school! We were still using 8086s in the year 2000 (same school as the genetics program!) but at least they had those sweet IBM keyboards.
I've voted for every single proposal that is supposed to help improve schools and fix infrastructure issues, but thanks to decades of NIMBYs, high housing prices have contributed to, of caused, nearly all of Seattle's woes.
> You represent a miniscule fraction of the world's population.
And a non-trivial % of HN readers who the topic "who runs spreadsheets to figure if they should have children" applies to.
My original point is that plenty of people I know indeed do the math on having a second or third child. Friends who bought a large house at 1/2 to 1/3rd the price houses go for now, not an issue! Everyone else is boned.
I can think of at least three people who've told me this is why they decided to stop at two children.
I do think you're right, though, that a lot of people gesture at the cost as a reason not to have kids when even if you removed that barrier they still wouldn't.
(In thinking about the effects of policies like this you need to think at the marginal parents: people who are close to the border on whether to have another kid and could be most easily swayed one way or the other.)
We could've afforded one or two more, but we stopped at two because it was a good balance for us between work, family, and personal interests. Neither one of us wanted to be a full time stay at home parent, and neither one of us wanted to subsume ourselves and our lives to the basic biological imperative just to have a bunch of kids.
Kids are a big commitment and a lot of work. I feel like having two gave us enough leeway to have the time and energy to devote to them as individuals when they needed it. In a larger family, that might not work out as well.
We should be investing literally all of our money into artificial wombs so that we can churn out humans like a factory. The technology is extremely close, and we could likely manufacture more lives than we could ever save with any kind of safety measures, even if we sunk all of our GDP into keeping everyone living alive.
It's not the nine months of gestation that's the barrier, it's the subsequent 25 years of child rearing. And as a society we value individuals and not just quantities: if I'm accused of infanticide offering to have another child will not balance the criminal books.
What happens when AI is a more effective parent/teacher than humans?
It's never away or preoccupied with work, never loses its temper or fights with the other parent, never too tired to play or engage with questions, the list goes on.
I'm not even suggesting heated robotic caregivers. Humans could still be employed to carry out its instructions in the real world, from hugs to diapers.
As dystopian as it sounds to us today, it's possible that such a system could consistently raise more well-adjusted adults while also being cheaper and freeing most adults from the burdens (as well as most joys) of parenthood.
In the future, AI may be so much better than humans that raising a child by hand is borderline illegal, except for a few religiously exempt groups.
I do sometimes wonder though if people who actually lived in such a world would truly perceive it as a dystopia, or if that's just our status quo bias.
I’m a woman, and most of the women my age (30s) view pregnancy as the source of a lot of body horror. I know I’d be a lot more interested in having a child if I knew for a fact that after giving birth I would have no chronic conditions. A lot can and does go wrong, even if it doesn’t result in death, and this is more and more common as average child-birthing age goes up.
> Or do we also count the lives of the children that they might have?
No; it is absurd to even talk about. Run from anyone who thinks this is legitimate intellectual discourse.
Let's bite this trolling hook for a second. If you're going to count the lives of those nonexistent children, you have to also count and subtract the deaths they will cause. A few of those children might turn out to be be murderers. Others will cause accidents, maybe big ones. Others still will have consumption habits that snuff out future lives.
Imagine if Adolf Hitler's mother had died in some accident before he had been conceived and born; how would you tally the accident?
Imagine in 1900 if people had some technology that would make the earth vanish into nothingness in 2050, after everyone currently alive had died. Would it have been morally neutral for them to deploy that technology, since the only people it would affect are nonexistent hypothetical people?
On your specific points:
> you have to also count and subtract the deaths they will cause
Agreed.
> A few of those children might turn out to be be murderers. Others will cause accidents, maybe big ones. Others still will have consumption habits that snuff out future lives.
That's right: each person that comes into existence has some chance of making the world worse for others, and some chance of making it better. I think that overall new people are a positive contribution, especially if you consider their own enjoyment of life, but if you think it's the other way then it's completely to reasonable count "more people will be born" as a negative feature of a policy.
> Imagine if Adolf Hitler's mother had died in some accident before he had been conceived and born; how would you tally the accident?
When looking at moral questions you're generally concerned with decisions: do I try jump in to help with this accident in front of me? Do I give money to this person that seems to need it more than I do? Do I advocate for this policy? It's not clear to me what sort of moral question your hypothetical corresponds to, since at the time of the accident (or before that if we're considering the value of some sort of policy that might have affected the chance of her dying) no one knows that it's her child in particular that would end up causing such enormous harm.
Basically, what you're asking is if we plant a time bomb, does it become morally neutral at a certain, sufficiently long time value, whereby it doesn't kill anyone who is alive today?
That time could be a lot shorter than 150 years. Say a one-year-long time bomb kills someone's newborn infant, and only that infant. When the bomb was planted, that infant hadn't yet been conceived. Of course that bomber is going behind bars.
Tangential: This argument comes up a lot, and I get that it's a specific example to make a general point, but are we that confident that removing Hitler from the equation means no Holocaust? It can't be denied that he had significant influence, but Nazis existed without him and antisemitism was widespread in Germany at least as far back as its founding. Am I wrong to think Hitler's contribution was not necessary for that outcome?
The novel "Time and Time again" by Ben Elton explores the possibility of averting of the world wars via time travel. I really enjoyed the book and would recommend. Without wanting to spoil anything, I would say it broadly agrees with your thesis.
Afaik, Hitler was instrumental in making Nazi party big and popular. They became big due to his speaking abilities. Antisemitism was widespread all around Europe. Germany was not the most antisemitic one - the Jews were running to Germany from Easter Europe.
The nazi party was not the only competitor for power and among those, it was only genocidal by ideology. Germany could end up as military dictatorship - there would be imperialism but it would not be the same. It could end up as actual democratic country too. But, the party that won were Nazi and there, Hitler was the one who made that party big.
I find the arguments in these areas absurd and not absurd in almost equal measure, but I don't think your argument is a strong one against.
If we bite the hook then the thing we care about is something like expected value.
That only applies for non-actualized future events. We tally the accident of Hitler's mother's death according to the probabilistic expected value of her contribution, which was approximately the same as any other woman of her time and place.
> One obvious objection to neutrality is the threat of extinction. If one couple refuses to have a child, it is neither good nor bad. But if every couple refuses, it is a catastrophe.
If the last human dies and there is no one there to witness it, who is there to claim this a catastrophe?
This article makes a big, implicit assumption about a very human-centric world, which I consider kind of naïve; the universe, including Earth, does not care or need to care about humanity in order to keep on existing. According to all current knowledge, it did just fine before us, and it will likely do just fine after us, even if we do our best to make it inhospitable e.g. via global nuclear warfare.
This seems a bit nihilistic, what other sort of universe is there for humans besides a human-centric one? Shouldn't humans indeed pursue human-centric concerns?
I think the mistake is to consider "human" something separate from the rest of the world as opposed to a more holistic point of view.
The fact that we have a somewhat complicated mind capable of abstract thinking doesn't mean we're anything more than bacteria on the grander scale.
The fact that our species has developed all over Earth and became its self-appointed "stewards" doesn't mean that a well-placed asteroid can't turn our "stewardship" into a futile battle for survival.
Dismissal of the result of some billion years of constant adaptation and struggle is also a mistake, IMO.
We are so much more than bacteria, and until proved otherwise, so far we are the smartest beings in the universe.
We will at some point, stop existing as a species.
This doesn't mean everything we do is meaningless.
Eternity and infinity intelligence are not the only measures we can choose to value ourselves, in fact, they smell too much like religion for my personal taste.
What we have is more struggle, more problems to overcome, more challenges and the possibility of succeeding, the possibility of leaving the solar system before the sun dies and kills the earth.
Step by step. Value the small victories. We have reached very far, so far.
From my perspective, you're not identifying an intellectual mistake made by others. You're talking about a difference of values. You don't highly value people being around to observe and participate in the universe, while others care a lot more about this.
What you are saying now is very different from the calculus required to determine if humanities extinction is a catastrophe.
It is one by our point of view, and most humans argue that (a) our point of view is the only one that matters since in the grand aspect we haven’t found any other intelligent point of view, though we theorize they may exist and (b) judging the pain of death as catastrophe is a personal choice, even on Earth we allow people to call the death of their loved ones catastrophic even if other humans continue to go on living blithely unaware of their pain.
There is so much of this downplaying of humans. We are certainly more than bacteria are any reasonable “scale”. We can create transmissions that reach other galaxies, we can split atoms, and even consider ourselves to be equal to bacteria because we conjure vague notions of incomprehensible advanced species. It’s just a very odd kind of self-deprecation.
I think a lot of modern "philosophers" and "religious" people like to think of humans as nothing special and that likely everything would be much better off if we returned to seeking shelter in caves and under lean-tos. I mean it's all relative, but I've only seen a very few ever actually turn their back on modern conveniences or live an ascetic/minimal life.
I think any intelligence persisting forward in time is success. If ai takes over it'll have a much easier time traveling at speed of light. & patience too. Humanity won't need to be slaughtered; microplastics in our balls will make us sterile enough
I would think consciousness, rather than intelligence, is the important component that should persist irrespective of humanity. Intelligence, curiousity, and creativity are important too, but on their own they don't hold moral significance. A universe of computers is not superior to a universe of atoms without something experiencing those abstractions and giving them meaning.
Based on this perspective, any argument about improving the lot of a human or humanity wound have to first make the case that it’s rational to care about humans in the first place.
Even if this position seems obvious to you, I respectfully would suggest you consider that most people do not hold extremely nihilistic views like this, and that a lack of nihilism is not naive.
I am willing to defend the parent here. Just because majority follows the urges imposed by their bodies does not automatically mean that everyone does. I personally would posit, that it is that very 'skin in the game' that makes humans create and reframe their very existence not only as something worthwhile, but also desirable to the world at large ( and even the universe in general ). In a very real sense, the universe simply cannot cannot care for us. It is not an anthropomorphic entity. It has no feelings, hopes or dreams. After we will inevitably end ( as likely many before us ), it will not change just because of it. It will have just been.
From that perspective, it is hard to argue that is not accurate. And if it is accurate, then positions contrary to it are not accurate and therefore naive.
The whole idea of measuring the value of different universe states in an objective way seems irrelevant to me. Most people care about surviving because it is subjectively valuable to them. Very few humans shoehorn themselves into a "view from nowhere" and attempt to derive from it some kind of lessons for how humanity should think about itself.
It's one way I guess, but there's no reason to prefer it, and it's not popular for obvious reasons.
Humans have feelings, hopes, and dreams. Humans are a subset of the universe. Therefore, the universe has feelings, hopes, and dreams.
Now that the universe has manifested we conscious agents of its matter, how dare we squander this gift? Just because it didn't come with an instruction manual? We will find our own purpose.
Does the universe enjoy having feelings, hopes, and dreams? This kind of thinking is anthropocentric and doesn't generalize to any scale. Consider cancer cells thinking that their goal (growth) is good for the organism, because, after all, they are part of it.
As a tiny representative of the universe, yes I do enjoy having feelings, hopes, and dreams. If nihilists find this to be meaningless, perhaps we simply disagree about which of us is the cancer.
It it is an interesting conversation to me even if it moves into a philosophical realm, where I have little to no experience. Why would we think of ourselves as the representatives of the universe, whereas we are closer to resembling atoms at the scales involved ( and even that seems to embellish our relative size ). Does having feelings, hopes and dreams bestows the status of an envoy? Nihilists do not see things as meaningless, which may carry negative connotations ( 'the cancer part' ). Rather, things are devoid of meaning. Nihilists recognize that meaning is not inherent, but rather ascribed by the person experiencing the feeling.
I will admit that I chuckled at the cancer comparison. How does the universe consider, which cells are 'good'?
If you show a skyscraper to an ant, should he abandon his queen because their little hill is too insignificant to matter? Or should he jump back in and build the best damn nest in the city? I just don't think relative scale is really important - even a galaxy-striding star-snacking titan would grapple with the same problem of meaning.
> Nihilists recognize that meaning is not inherent, but rather ascribed by the person experiencing the feeling.
That sounds reasonable, so here's an attempt at a synthesis. The universe is huge and mostly empty, but here we have a tiny patch full of life and self-ascribed meaning. Does the universe prefer life? The part that's alive certainly does! So don't let it fall to ashes just to appease the void. I think that's the best answer a mere mortal can give.
> If the last human dies and there is no one there to witness it, who is there to claim this a catastrophe?
This is an interesting question, and the answer one gives is highly dependent upon their worldview and beliefs.
From a Christian perspective (on which most of the Western world was based), the earth was given to humans along with an explicit decree to have children and "subdue" it and everything on it ( https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=genesis+1%3A28&... ). Therefore in the Christian worldview, Earth is pretty explicitly defined as human-centric, and human life is considered above all else on this Earth.
I don't believe a single translated passage in the Old Testament book of Genesis captures the entirety of the Christian worldview on this particular subject.
> [...] the universe, including Earth, does not care or need to care about humanity in order to keep on existing.
This objection is technically correct, but misses the point completely. It's irrelevant whether "the universe" cares – all that matters to humanity is whether humans care. And they do care about the survival of their species.
Imagine Earth has the only living things in the knowable universe. And then it all dies, for some reason. To me that seems like a waste of a perfectly good universe.
A universe without a conscious observer seems kind of pointless to me.
Why does it need to have a point? You and I will die, humanity will one day end and later so will the universe, so there isn't really any point to anything.
Please elaborate, this is crossing over into strangely absurd territory. What model are you using to reason about and evaluate the question of life throughout the Universe? Or, what makes Earth such a special environment that there could only ever be one such place, and no other planets also meeting similar criteria supportive of life? There are nearly innumerable other chances for this to exist throughout the vastness of the Universe. Our human brains can't truly grasp the scale, it's far beyond what we encounter in day to day life. I'll take those odds.
It is well known that the Drake Equation is not a serious thing. The history of it was that it was basically a conversation starter. There may be documentaries that likened it to something more solid like Standard Model, but that’s not the case. It’s a hurried back of the envelope pop-culture math-y thing that is full of vague uncertainties. We have a non-random sample of one. How can you estimate anything based on that? You can look this up; the Drake Equation is not considered something really serious, downvotes aside.
what even is humanity's point? Consciousness is quite the curse. Existence is itself absurd. No human being present would mean no existential dread atleast.
There's also the proposition of Antinatalism [1] / The Case for Not Being Born [2] - about the only sure way to guarantee the absolute absence of pain / discomfort. Where one David Benatar argues that we shouldn't feel pity for the missed pleasure / happiness / meaning of somebody that isn't born / doesn't exist, vs the inevitable pain that any human is bound to suffer at some point.
> If the last human dies and there is no one there to witness it, who is there to claim this a catastrophe?
I would care. As a human (as a living organism, really), I have children because I hope they outlive me (that's not the only reason!). In a way, they are what's left of me when I'm dead. And my grandchildren when my children are dead. So, yes, I would be sad if my children choose to not have any children themselves, and I would consider it a catastrophe if the hypothesis that a whole generation stopped having kids materialized.
But if your children's children's children decide not to have kids then you'll already be gone so you won't care. We can talk about worry about the future without us while we're still alive but once we're dead it's kind of immaterial what we wanted.
It is a catastrophe for the humanity by the very definition of catastrophe. I love this gung-ho nihilism as much as the next person but come on. No one thinks a supernova 80 million light years from Earth will be sad but of course it is a human-centric view as it is expressed by humans, who for all we know are the only advanced intelligent beings in the universe.
When the universe ends, then everything will be dead and nothing and no one will care. Therefore, the entire field of philosophy is solved, all everything has zero worth, and so any regard to if things should live or die is meaningless.
I would go even further: I consider “earth” as the rock all the living stuff is on top of. So even if it would become a bare rock it would not care. It’s just a rock.
Sure, the universe seems infinite enough both in time and space. Assuming that laws of statistics hold, there should be other areas where there's optimum for life as we know it to develop - even if we won't get to meet it because we miss it by a few millions or billions of years.
This same concept comes up frequently, when you have two opposing states of the same entity, which both oppose changing to the other.
i.e. a sleepy kid who doesn't want to go to bed vs that same kid, well-rested the next day. They both resist becoming each other, yet they're the same person.
There doesn't seem to be a way to rectify this conflict without a unifying value system (or just letting nature decide). Parents frequently overrule one version of an entity and force it to another. There are more contentious examples like forcing an alcoholic to get sober, or putting a resistant kid through boot camp "for their own good".
The general point is that there's an argument against always obeying an entity's local preferences. But, generally accepting the right to overrule someone's preferences opens the door to all kinds of exploitation, too. It doesn't seem clear how to resolve this, and there may not be a single answer. Some people argue as if all potential states are equally valid, and we should judge by the retroactive reward we would get from adjusting states.
I was a former stay up all night kid. Honestly the reason was I had no time for myself at all unless it was the end of the day. From the morning until like 9pm you are tied up with school or homework and forced to do crap you hate, and you get in trouble for doing stuff you like. I was astounded at how much free time I ended up having in college, to the point it severely backfired and I had to relearn how to actually study and manage my time after a few bad semesters. Its like what was good for me as a student was always at odds with my mental health since the school system doesnt have a concept of “self care” that therapists speak of.
Resisting change is generally smart (to avoid exploitation) - there have always been charlatans and innate stubbornness seems to me to be valuable to resist them. Particularly when the cost of evaluating a claim is high, just dumbly resisting change can be beneficial. But change can also be good, obviously.
So I'm trying to figure out what you meant! Are you pointing to 'strengthen' as the main value? i.e. to preserve your existence in the world as one of the primary values? That makes sense to me and would certainly often be selected for.
I sort of took your argument a level further before responding. Your line of reasoning begs the age-old ethical question of if and how we should compel behavior in others (whether “the other” is physically someone else or simply our future self) for some longer-term or greater benefit?
The “strengthening” part of the answer is in essence a rejection of hedonism, as well.
I offer up a solution may be to abandon cultures of preference-making/-sticking/-catering and help people notice the impact of their actions. This enables deeper learning.
It's nice to hear of a few other philosophers in this area aside from Peter Singer, the Effective Altruism community and trolley car problems.
These moral scales philosophers employ do seem to rest on unquestioned axioms about the value of human time spent alive. I constantly wonder why if they are philosophers that they don't examine the axioms themselves more? Often it feels like they try to weigh say the potential of a younger person to live longer versus the weight of an older person with less time to live. I don't know that this kind of calculus really makes sense - it feels like it quickly leads to logical conundrums because it's extremely hard to precisely weigh one life versus another.
If I had to decide between two lives (or say if the Earth was going to be struck by an asteroid) it feels like a better scheme is to weight 'diversity' - to focus less on the happiness or joy or quality of life and more on trying to select for many different kinds of minds. So for example I'd try to save a diverse mixture of kinds of people from a sinking ship, or I'd try to select for people from say indigenous tribal cultures that were under-represented in outcomes. I'd probably bias mostly towards humans simply because I don't know of anything else that can cogitate, but I'd also try to include larger systems of living organisms. Selecting for diversity rather than quality of life feels like it avoids some of the tyranny of the masses kind of thinking and the worst of human-centric thinking.
> because it's extremely hard to precisely weigh one life versus another.
I'd say it's impossible to do this in any ethical way without perfect knowledge of the future. When it comes to solving this as a civil issue, this is not at all what we do. We look at the future potential value of that individual persons life and then ask a jury to decide the award.
> So for example I'd try to save a diverse mixture of kinds of people from a sinking ship
Assuming you can actually measure diversity acceptably in such conditions.
> or I'd try to select for people from say indigenous tribal cultures that were under-represented in outcomes
Without asking why they're under represented? Is a tribe of cannibals or a classroom of children more valuable?
> Selecting for diversity rather than quality of life feels like it avoids some of the tyranny of the masses kind of thinking and the worst of human-centric thinking.
You've only described racial diversity. What about diversity of lived experience? Diversity of thought? Diversity of religion? Where do these rank against race?
The problem with these sorts of arguments is that you quickly run into hypothetical situations with large moral costs, creating Pascal's Wager-type issues where you have a moral duty to go to absurd lengths to avoid them.
I know I don't. That's not good or bad, it just is a simple opinion/sentiment. It's not an ethical question either. Ethics are about informing our actions, not our opinions about how things are regardless of our actions. Accidents happen, people get sick and die, etc. All of them eventually. Sucks for the people involved when that happens of course. And that's a reason to work to prevent/delay the things that kill us. But not because of their future offspring.
Nature has this nice self regulating principle where species try to procreate as much as needed to sustain or grow the population while the rest of nature tries to treat that as manna from heaven (i.e. food). That cycle might just be a bit out of wack with our species judging from the explosive growth in the last century. We have few natural predators left that are hunting and eating us. Many of the people that fail to die end up procreating and that offspring is collectively becoming a burden on our planet. 8 billion and counting apparently. At the same time we figured out how to have fun without committing to more offspring (i.e. birth control).
So, an actual ethical question directly related to the titular question is whether it is ethical to use birth control. In many places people opt into that (with some level of enthusiasm even). In other places it is enforced/strongly encouraged by governments, which raises a few other ethical issues. But overall the effect is that our populations start shrinking as wealth and prosperity increase and more people refrain from procreating as much as they would have otherwise. China no longer needs to enforce their former one child policy. They only needed that while they were poor. Now India, which has no such policy, is taking over as the largest country by population. They are still growing rapidly. And more so in the poorer regions.
But it suggests to me that the ethical thing is to actually promote wealth and prosperity everywhere. People live nicer lives, make more informed choices, and they procreate less (i.e. only when they really want to). Might cause a few individuals to never exist but it might also make it easier to fix our planet for the rest of us.
Sort of the repugnant option without actually being all that repugnant.
> Modulo a few technical assumptions - any system of population ethics has to embrace either the Repugnant Conclusion, the Anti-Egalitarian Conclusion or the Sadistic conclusion.
Something to keep in mind when thinking about population ethics.
If you think this is taking the theory to the extreme with no contact in the real world you may want to think why China instituted the one child policy.
> cost of preventing temperatures rising... With a smaller population of 8.7bn, the cost would drop to $471. The second option is cheaper.
Interesting, analyzing hypotheticals that are based on loads of half-baked presumptions. It'd be even cheaper with a smaller population of 0.7bn. (Were the huge gains to be made by switching to renewables factored in here?) Maybe mixing those who will never-be-born into this drunken calculus is an attempt to suggest that some humanity is involved?
This whole article seems to talk about policy and regulation while ignoring the natural chaos/order to the world. There are too many myths/stories/recent lessons where we have learned that mankind cannot control nature. The more we try, the more devastating it can be. Also another reason why the most noble thing is when one sacrifices their own life for another.
To even consider putting a cost/benefit on life is a fool's errand. There's no satisfactory solution to the trolley problem(Unless self-sacrifice is allowed) nor absolute to the potential of one's life(including your own). The titanic is an overused example, but those who sacrificed their lives can be thought as reaching immortality given their names and story continue to be told and learned from. Many more lives were saved because of their sacrifices beyond those saved at the time.
I can't help but feel these viewpoints are very egotistical/selfish concerned about individual happiness and comfort while ignoring the inevitable of our deaths and the future of our species thriving alongside the ever-changing world without us.
The huge flaw here is that this analysis only cares about genetic impact. Here's a grandma who is past childbearing age. But her grandchildren still really want their grandma. Her children still really want her advice. She's trying to keep her young neighbor from committing suicide. And so on. The impact of her death is far broader than the future children she could have.
depopulation agenda for all to see. with eugenics from the back door bolted on: "the fear of large populations of low-quality lives has overshadowed the field of population ethics"
also opens the door to scanning the developing fetus for diseases (+- other attributes) and termination if the fetus fails to meet some quality control.
Large population implies low quality existence, at least in a system of finite resources. Multiplication for the sake of it is almost a guarantee to suffering for some.
The most important resource for us people is other people!
A lone human typically doesn't survive the winter. Big populations allow division of labor which is what has given us the, to people of the less populated past, unthinkable prosperity and long healthy lives.
Nobody is talking about lone humans. They're talking about the difference between 8 billion and 16 billion. It's not likely that any significant economies of scale that have somehow not managed to emerge at 8 billion people will emerge when you double that.
The universe is effectively infinite btw. Most people quite like potatoes and if there's a larger population more people can be musicians. The bloody minded bean counter mentality is more religion than anything.
But we are limited to the part of the universe that we can access.
We've got a single planet we can easily access.
We've got a few more planets we can reasonably access with reasonably foreseeable improvements to our technology.
Past that, unless there are some major fundamental physics breakthroughs, we've got no even remotely plausible way to make use of any resource outside the solar system in any volume that makes a noticeable difference.
I do not care what the current social panic is and how they like to call things.
If you put yeast in a jar and some sugar in it, the yeast is going to consume all the sugar and grow until there's no more nutrient left, and then just die.
Malthus didn't account for technology. We'll see how far that stretches.
Malthus reasoning is rock solid. Exponential population growth puts strain on finite resources. Malthus was a huge influence on Darwin. That premise - the tension between different growth rates of populations and resources - underlies the theory of natural selection, people on this forum will certainly get behind that. But call it Malthusian, and it's suddenly false.
It's also wrong to think that Malthus only just predicted doom. He used his model to explain a great deal of sociological phenomena (e.g. infanticide in china, delayed child rearing in wealthier societies, differences in diet between east and west).
It's not that Malthus was wrong. It was that he was only mostly correct. People today are nitpicking on the little bits and pieces where he was incomplete. He also wrote this at the start of the industrial revolution. He couldn't have known.
> Malthus didn't account for technology. We'll see how far that stretches.
The later you are in the exponential, the less technology can stretch it.
At a 1% annual growth rate, for example, we've about 3400 years before the mass needed for the bodies of all then living humans will equal the combined mass of the Earth and Moon.
Another 600 years and the mass of living humans equals the mass of Jupiter.
700 more years and the mass of all living humans equals the mass of the entire solar system.
2000 more years the mass of all living humans equals the mass of the entire Milky Way.
Less than 100 years after that we need to add the entire mass of the Andromeda Galaxy.
From that to needing the entire mass of the observable universe for human bodies is just another 5500 years (around 12300 years from now).
Coincidentally (at least I think it is a coincidence...) that's also about the time that without FTL travel we run out of space in the universe to hold everybody. Right now every human is on or very near Earth. Given no FTL, it follows that N years from now every human must be within N light-years of Earth.
Take the volume of a sphere of radius N light-years, and divide that by the number of people alive N years from now at 1% annual growth. That gives you how much space you have available per person.
Around N=12000 the available space per person to drops under 0.06 m^3, which is the volume of a typical human.
At 0.1% growth all the intervals above are about 10 times longer, so we hit the mass limit and the space limit at around 120000 years from now. 0.01% growth moves those both out to around 1.2 million years.
Exponentials are truly terrifying. They can be cute and cuddly when they are young, but the mature form eats everything.
Interesting to note that a lot of ideas contemporary with Malthus were wrong. For example, it was thought that the popular use of contraception would result in people marrying younger, since men would not fear taking a wife early in their career (they could control when and how many children to have, in harmony with whatever economic resources they might have). It turns out that contraception had the opposite effect
This comment is bound to spark a lot of response - it hits sensitive issues that we 'the masses' may have some worries about. It speaks to a populist conspiracy fear - that there is a "them" that wants to get rid of "us". That conspiracy is not actually proven.
Like; it an 'emotional' argument but doesn't actually propose solutions. I'd like to hear more about solutions or actual push back rather than simply push the emotion button over a conspiracy fear.
True it is The Economist, which can be suspect in that it tends to reflect something of an agenda of a minority population with a lot of power. I am in fact willing to believe that there is a small group of people who would prefer there to be less people period. But it still doesn't feel unreasonable to examine our morals. I'd prefer to build coherent arguments to oppose the concepts if these are bad concepts. Not just push the emotion button a lot.
If a single family has to make decisions about having more babies or not based on budget, then why can't a planet full of people decide how many people should exist period? Why is that "bad" to even think about?
And why not 'scan' an unborn child for diseases and terminate in some cases? I don't think it implicitly is 'defacto bad' as the sentence implies. This second comment attempts to tie larger issues of population to more narrow fear based issues around abortion. It's creating a gordian knot. It's not a great argument.
Is there a way to make an argument that isn't mashing the emotion button over and over? And that isn't trying to conflate far and near issues together into an unresolvable emotional morass?
I do favor a pro-choice stance, but I want to avoid strictly falling down into a pro-choice versus pro-life stance since that is hugely loaded politically with people on the left hugely inflamed at the restriction in women's freedoms, and people on the right ostensibly outraged that every single life is not seen as sacred. As a left leaning person I do think the people on the right are not charitable, and I do think they don't actually care about lives, but rather they are using babies as emotional tools to try manipulate emotions and hold onto power. So I tend to think pro-lifers are manipulative - basically I see them as trying to manipulate me with their rhetoric. But I am willing to acknowledge that it is worth trying to think about this more; a charitable read has to include room for some pro-life arguments that human life is indeed sacred. The problem with the scanning statement however is that it leads us only to an emotional argument - and those are not solvable today. It might be nice to propose an idea or solution, not just (again) hit the emotion button.
If we have a mental model of a potential child as having the best possible outcomes, having the most joyous life, contributing the most - then of course it is an utter tragedy to deprive that child of a possible life. But I think our mental model of life should be more like what we actually see in nature; a garden that is riotous and constantly and eagerly grows, and we weed and prune that garden constantly. I'd argue that we are 'helpess gardeners' - we cannot avoid gardening, we cannot avoid stepping in the garden, we can only choose where to step. The solution space I see here that bridges left and right values is to decide who the decision maker is around if a child lives or dies. I'd argue the best decision maker is the person most closely involved and most entangled with that life - basically the mother. I'd pour dollars funding and energy into the people with utereses - rather than into judges and police. Any structural imperialism that deprives the mother of agency and turns them into a baby factory feels cruel to me but also is clearly not valuing the mommas life itself. If people on the left or the right want to fund that mother, educate that mother, argue with that mother - then they should empower the uterus owner as much as they wish - pay for schooling, education, rhetoric - whatever they want to expose them to - but delegate the power of the decision to the uterus owner. People on the right then get a chance to bombard that poor uterus owner with their campaign - but so be it - at least the energy, money and attention are placed in the right spot. This is more diverse, close to the ground, grass roots and reflects more the nature of the world - that decisions should be distributed and local - more ecological. In any world where uterus owners were male this would instantly be the case - we only consider denying women agency because we come from a patriarchy.
Probably in fact - if we want to solve far field issues like planetary population concerns, then education is probably the best way in general. The system as a whole can load balance births with locally available resources if it is allowed to do so I believe.
What? Answer the question in word and meaning if you answer and not your deranged interpretation of it. People are voluntary getting less children in almost every western society.
> do you want to be the biggest but only biomass left on the planet just to own the libs?
What does this mean? You're asking about the human race right? Or are you literally asking the parent if they want to grow into the fattest sole survivor on the planet? I'm confused by what you're even asking.
Apparently, three-quarters of Earth's food supply draws on just 12 crops and five livestock species. Is that a good thing? a bad thing? Or, as I believe, not really either good or bad. That situation has been sustained for quite a while already right?
Why do we not choose to broaden the range of species that we cultivate? Are most just another species of rat or weed? Maybe more varieties of carrot are just better. Or just more carrots in general for that matter.
Using the "eugenics" angle to argue against people who want a sustainable world (while parroting the agenda of Elon "let's all move to Mars" Musk who believes he is such a superior being he needs to grace the world with 10+ kids) is uproarious when it comes from a camp is viciously against immigration.
The US has a population density 1/15th India's. It's high time for a billion Indians to move to the US.
REPORTER: The climate crisis. We’ve seen protests all over the globe this month. Mostly led by young people like Gretta Turnburg. Does the public outcry...does that increase the urgency for what you guys are doing here?
ELON: Well, I mean I really view what we’re doing here as making life multiplanetary as opposed to escaping, and I think like 99 percent of our resources should be spent making sure the future on Earth is good. But I think at least 1% of our resources should be used to make like multiplanetary and extending consciousness out to other planets. Both for the defensives reason of preserving the light of consciousness into the future as well as the adventure, the excitement - I find it personally more motivating than the defensive argument.
REPORTER: So you prefer to be an optimist rather than a pessimist?
ELON: I mean I think excitement and adventure and a sense of possibility about the future are incredibly important. Otherwise, why live?
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I’m getting to the point where I assume that comments like yours are dramatically mischaracterizing Musk. He’s so easy to criticize without ascribing hyperbolic-ly stupid arguments to him.
It seems the goal of these types of policy decisions is to ensure continuity and prevent catastrophes (i.e. a sudden loss of diversity). A range of potential populations could fit these criteria. Beyond that, agonizing about what you should do one way or the other seems egotistical to me. Just trust in the wisdom of the crowd.
Does this argument extend to suggesting that we have a moral duty to create life as long as that life lives a good life?
If you you only have one child, should you have more?
If we can raise animals humanely and kill them humanely, is that actually ethical? Is it better for a cow to have lived a couple of years versus have never been born at all?
Should we care about people who need never exist? Absolutely not. Why? As we've seen in the US in 2022, the idea of giving the conceived rights as people is weaponized to rob their carriers of autonomy and the access to medical care. I find it strange that an article that talks about theoretical people never once mentions abortion.
Also, the example of the Titanic is brought up without even mentioning sufferage, which is another perplexing omission. The "women and children first" idea catalyzed the idea that women should have the same rights as men. Talking about "potential people" is a step backwards.
There's a lot of talk about low-quality lives. This is colonial thinking, which is unsurprising coming from such an august neoliberal institution. The "savages" and the "poor" shouldn't be having children, the argument goes. But why are African countries, for example, generally poor? That wasn't an accident. It is the result of a policy of exploitation going back centuries. So if we really want more happy people, maybe we should stop making so many people needlessly unhappy.
Is it really policy of exploitation or is their poverty a result of having 7 children per woman? Anybody would have trouble feeding, dressing and educating that many kids. Even the colonizing Brits who were having too many kids were living in poverty.
I wonder if the finite growth rate of the light-cone disarms the repugnant conclusion, by limiting the bound on population size that you can trade up to.
The leading story about the HMS Birkenhead is fascinating, though looking up further info finds that of the 193 saved "the survivors comprised 113 soldiers (all ranks), 6 Royal Marines, 54 seamen (all ranks), 7 women, 13 children and at least one male civilian".
"Why are women and children on a troop transport?" is a natural next question, and apparently they were family of senior officers.
We've already collectively decided the past few years it is perfectly okay to allow workers and visitors into nursing/retirement-homes unvaccinated and unmasked and sometimes even known sick because they aren't going to change their lives in the slightest for anyone else.
Locations have had massive wipeouts of residents, nothing changes, people want it this way is the only logical conclusion.
