Curious how many people share this opinion, but I think this is extremely good news. I would love to see birth rates drop below replenishment across the globe. We simply don't need billions of humans. We have done, and continue to do major damage to our environment and historically a tiny minority has benefited from the labor of the majority. The people who benefit most from an increasing population are those who exploit people to increase their quality of life in clean sanctuaries while distancing themselves from the effort and waste required to maintain those lifestyles.
You make an excellent point, and I'll raise a counterargument. I would claim, simply, that human life is intrinsically a good thing. I believe that my life is worth living, that it is better that I'm alive than if I were dead. I'll presume that everyone who reads this believes the same about their own lives. In that case, the more people alive, the better -- (if all else is equal).
That said, the philosopher Derek Parfit anticipated this and raises a counterargument to my argument above, known as the "mere addition paradox". [1] Roughly speaking, it goes as follows.
1. Suppose you have a population of 1,000,000 people, living happy, healthy, productive lives. Let's stipulate that this is a good thing.
2. Now, suppose in addition to this, suppose you have a second population of 1,000,000 people, who lead difficult lives with a lot of hardship, but whose lives are (perhaps barely) worth living. Then, if human life is intrisically good, then it is good that these people also exist. (This is the "mere addition" part.)
3. Given these two populations, equality is a good thing: lower the standard of living of the first million people ever so slightly, and raise the standard of the second group to match the first. This, too, seems to be a good thing.
4. Repeat. Eventually you arrive at a huge population, living lives of misery and squalor which are just slightly better than nothing -- but which one has argued is a better scenario than your original million people. This is the "repugnant conclusion".
If nothing else more humans increase our collective potential intelligence to solve problems.
It's my my main issue with the anti-natalist movement: If theoretically everyone who believed in climate change agreed that anti-natalism was the solution, by definition within a generation the largest voting block would be the children of climate deniers. Which would actually make climate change much worse.
We don't need fewer humans, we need smarter/better institutions and more efficient technology. Every life born is one more potential option for a breakthrough.
> If theoretically everyone who believed in climate change agreed that anti-natalism was the solution, by definition within a generation the largest voting block would be the children of climate deniers. Which would actually make climate change much worse.
As an anti-natalist (more precise would be anatalist, I am not opposing that other people have kids, I just wish they chose not to), let me address that. The point is not everybody to not have kids, but just enough to stabilize or slightly decrease the population.
First, you're assuming that climate denial is genetic and not cultural. Which is a big assumption, and I am in general in favor of nurture argument. (As a side note, by waiting longer to have kids, humans might actually be selecting for kids that are learning more and longer, which favors nurture even more.)
However, even if I take that assumption. If I chose not to have kids, that very much means I do not care about biology and what my genetics want. I am making the decision as a person free of the evolutionary pressure (well, somewhat, because I still care about survival of human race). Therefore, I am not sure why I should be bothered by the evolutionary pressure on other individuals. The truth is, it is going to be their battle. I can only lend them a helping hand (and perhaps an example), and do (what I believe is) a morally correct thing. If they mess up and still act wrong, it's not my moral responsibility.
It is a similar question as to whether or not vote strategically. If everybody votes strategically, you can get a result that no one wants. Therefore, somebody has to sacrifice and decidedly vote not strategically.
I'm not assuming climate denial is genetic at all, parents and cultures have a great deal of influence on their children's beliefs. If every Christian decided to not have kids tomorrow the world would be mostly Muslim and Hindu within a few decades. The few converts to Christianity would not replace the losses. Same with Climate Change. If the only culture that reproduces is climate deniers, the they will be the majority. In democracies majorities win.
I'm not saying you or anyone else should have kids out of some sense of duty. If you don't want kids, fine. People having kids they didn't want has led to a lot of messed up families. However I find the argument that it's because of climate change to be a post-hoc rationalization. It's like if during the black death people said they're not having kids because it's morally correct to not produce more plague carriers.
As for your voting analogy, under our current system (in the US) if everyone votes strategically some good might occur albeit in a somewhat corrupt, half-assed manner. If fewer people vote strategically then those who vote strategically win, however small a minority they might be. That's how we ended up with a two party system. Alliances willing to compromise parts of their values will defeat smaller but pure adversaries.
> I'm not assuming climate denial is genetic at all, parents and cultures have a great deal of influence on their children's beliefs.
I think for my argument it doesn't matter whether the inheritance of the denialist position happens through biological or cultural means. Either way, what you're assuming is that by and large people cannot change their position (from the position of their parents) based on the situation they will find themselves in, that they cannot adapt culturally (i.e. they can only adapt via natural selection).
> However I find the argument that it's because of climate change to be a post-hoc rationalization.
Maybe it is. How can anyone know? I don't think it changes anything in the debate, if it's just a rationalization of something else. Maybe your belief that it is a post-hoc rationalization is a rationalization of something as well.
> under our current system (in the US) if everyone votes strategically some good might occur albeit in a somewhat corrupt, half-assed manner
Saying "some good might occur" is equivalent of "some bad might occur", which was my point. Your (not mine) U.S. voting system is horrible, you should push for changing it into something more sane. But regardless, I think what I wrote is true for most voting systems.
Well, I didn't want to say that out loud, but the argument is a soft version of "stupid people will win" argument, which I disagree with (and I find it repulsively elitist). That's where the genetics comes in; I should have written biology instead of genetics, though.
We (humans) are so mind-blowingly disorganized at solving problems that you likely could have much more of an impact focusing on solving that organization problem (even just a small part of it) than spending resources raising kids. And that is ignoring the environmental impact.
IOW, if your goal is to better humanity, having a kid is a really, really blunt instrument versus using more of your brain capacity x time on that goal.
If it were genuinely the case that human life should be maximized, we should lower everyone's standard of living as much as possible (it consumes resources), and then force everyone to have as many children as possible.
Of course, that would also maximize human suffering, but apparently human life is intrinsically good regardless of suffering, so not a problem.
This is perspective from purely human view, ignoring just about everything else that makes reality, which is way more complex.
People don't live in vacuum, we destroy our environment on maybe even exponential scale as our numbers grow. Extermination of vast amounts of species and whole ecosystems might mean nothing to you, but sure as hell is something I value very highly.
I am not an extremist, I don't claim that earth and universe would be just fine without humans, we can be a worthy addition even if only for selfish purposes. But as usually some middle path is probably the best, especially in long term view, which is very hard to model for human mind.
> This is perspective from purely human view, ignoring just about everything else that makes reality, which is way more complex.
I agree. (And, in particular, I agree that ecological diversity is very important.) I consider it to be something of a foundational model -- kind of like how in introductory physics you assume that things like air resistance don't exist.
> Given these two populations, equality is a good thing: lower the standard of living of the first million people ever so slightly, and raise the standard of the second group to match the first.
I'm trying to understand why you would repeat this step if you've lowered the standard of the first million ever so slightly but have already matched the miserable million to be that of the happy million?
Repeat steps 2 and 3: in addition to the now combined group of two million people, assume that you have an additional group of two million people living difficult lives. Now repeat step 3, and so on, until you've doubled the population many times.
Why cant you add a million happy people instead? or both? I understand this is a philosophical thought experiment, but of course if you keep diluting substance X with more and more of substance Y, you'll eventually get mostly substance Y...right? Is it impossible for a society to add 1 happy person for every unhappy person?
> if you keep diluting substance X with more and more of substance Y, you'll eventually get mostly substance Y.
Exactly, that's the paradox. Parfit's argument stipulates a series of steps each of which seems to make the world better, but where the end result seems to be worse than what you started with.
Hopefully, we can avoid the paradox, and instead grow in such a way that everyone thrives and we mitigate the negative effects on the environment.
In this case, it's a good thing, because the birthrates declined most for women 24 and younger. Creating another person is one of the most carbon-intensive actions anyone can do, you're literally spawning a lifetime of energy use. Best to do that when you're SURE they will have all the resources they need to be a productive and helpful member of society...not when you're 16 and can't care for them properly.
I do think there is value to having a balanced aged pyramid, however. We don't want a China or Japan situation, where there are far too many old people, which would crush the younger members of society under the burden of caring. The one way to counteract that would be immigration, which has been a hot-button issue and is not a given or perfect remedy for population pyramids.
how can a human being be simplifed down to a "lifetime of energy use" and a very carbon-intensive action? I know this language has normalized and that we use it with "good" intentions, but sometimes we sound much more soulless and anti-human than even the language of soviet ideology
Easily. As a human, based on your country [1], you will emit a certain amount of fossil CO2 over your lifetime. You will have an impact on natural resources. This math is no different than estimating your dollar value for something like a payout in the event you are accidentally killed.
Alternatively are you saying that people moving to less carbon intensive economies would also be a “good thing”. Get as many people from the developed world to move to places where they’d have less environmental impact? Though I’m sure there would be massive resistance from the affected people as well as from the destinations as they would upset the order on those places.
The two most crucial focuses would be to decarbonize carbon intensive economies, and throwing massive amounts of money at education and healthcare for women in developing countries.
Developed countries already have total fertility rates at or below replacement rate; it's all population momentum now, so you want to reduce the impact of everyone living a first world life for the remainder of their life span. Less combustion vehicles, less unnecessary air travel, fossil generation plants, meat heavy diets, etc. We're already headed in this direction, we just need to invest more heavily (Green New Deal, ESG funds, etc).
Regarding education and healthcare in developing countries, educated, empowered women with access to robust healthcare have fewer children [1] [2], and this data holds true across the entire world, even in countries that attempt to use generous subsidies to encourage higher fertility rates.
Moving folks from the developing world to the developed world, or vice versa, wouldn't have a meaningful impact IMHO.
True, but also we need to also do a rethink of how the savings from decarbonization are socialized on the form of higher quality of life available at a lower cost to more people.
If most of the savings of decarbonization go to capital, we will end up just bringing our current issues with growing wealth inequality into the decarbonized economy.
Developed economies should lead the way on this by demonstrating how a high quality of life can be preserved with decarbonization at population scale.
That means not just for the wealthy to build net zero eco-mansions and drive Teslas, but for most regular people's energy bills (for both home and transportation) to drop to near amortized capital investment cost
of renewables plus the marginal cost of producing renewable energy, which should be far lower than fossil fuels.
i understand it on theory, my problem is that this language assumes human life is somehow "measurable" and comparable to a random number and that regulations/change of society should follow: this sounds to me like the same way of thinking that eventually did let eugenics become big(later nazism) and later all kinds of communist social experiments to happen (and also sadly leading to many capitalist abuses of society): once our life is mostly a variable in a big calculation, in which stuff like iq/carbon print/social production is more important, you have problems
but if this changes the way whole societies live, is this really respect anymore? (X respects his life, but is afraid of even having children because Y)
Finite systems don't care about the human condition. Does gravity care about your opinion as you race towards the ground? No, it just is. Such is the consumption of resources in a finite system.
It sounds like you mean for respect to be an acceptance of entitlement. Again, I'm unsure how to reconcile that when resources are finite.
ah, i see what you mean now: anyway, most resources aren't really finite, as many of them are renewable, especially when you have the need and ability of more people
> Creating another person is one of the most carbon-intensive actions anyone can do, you're literally spawning a lifetime of energy use.
Cutting back on energy use is the most regressive way of solving climate change. We will almost certainly use more energy in the future, regardless of the population.
We have solutions to that. The biggest remaining problem right now is a few vested interests who don’t like the solutions we have because their wealth is tied to lots of people burning lots of stuff.
There are other reasons not to follow this path, but that isn’t one of them.
Right, and that's why the otherwise learned people who have been predicting, incorrectly, for thousands of years, that the earth was at/past carrying capacity have been wrong: more people means more human capacity, and that has outweighed having more mouths to feed.
There is no scientific consensus on the impact of climate change on total food production (there is a significant school of thought that it will increase due to increased production in Canada and Russia), and there's no consensus at all on what the carrying capacity of earth is.
Check the IPCC report:
For the major crops (wheat, rice, and maize) in tropical and temperate regions, climate change without adaptation will negatively
impact production for local temperature increases of 2°C or more above late-20th-century levels, although individual locations
may benefit (medium confidence). {7.4, Figure 7-4} Projected impacts vary across crops and regions and adaptation scenarios,
with about 10% of projections for the period 2030–2049 showing yield gains of more than 10% and about 10% of projections
showing yield losses of more than 25%, compared to the late 20th century.
>Creating another person is one of the most carbon-intensive actions anyone can do, you're literally spawning a lifetime of energy use.
This feels like a very odd view because the reverse is near profane thought.
>Best to do that when you're SURE they will have all the resources they need to be a productive and helpful member of society...not when you're 16 and can't care for them properly.
If it is okay to accept this logic based on age, what about other factors? For example, income level?
Japan gets talked about a lot but Taiwan and SK are doing worse if you see TFR. TFR of SK was below 1 in 2018, replacement level being 2.1. It would be interesting to see how this plays out in the next two decades over there considering the high life expectancy.
Interestingly both have major geopolitical disputes which are a critical part of their national discourse in addition to being highly developed economies and associated drop in TFR .
> Creating another person is one of the most carbon-intensive actions anyone can do
This is a bold blanket statement that I can't agree with. It all depends on how this new person will live their life. I would argue that creating 10 new persons in a third world country doesn't hurt the environment as much as 1 single person in the US or in Europe.
> Creating another person is one of the most carbon-intensive actions anyone can do [...] Best to do that when you're SURE they will have all the resources they need to be a productive and helpful member of society...
I totally get the sentiment, but history stubbornly is full of people born into abject poverty who somehow rise to the occasion. Take a look on Wikipedia at inventor profiles. Our best, life changing inventions came from people who were born into less-than-ideal situations. In many ways the impact people have on the world is a dice roll and not a matter of proper financial preparation.
The cause of this is an overemphasis on consumption, not an increase in the number of human beings alive.
Ironically this consumption-based mentality is also one cause of the declining birth rates in developed countries. On a material level, potential middle-class parents are vastly better off today than the parents of ~100 years ago. As a percentage of income, food is cheaper, entertainment and education are essentially free (thanks to the Internet), clothing doesn't need to be hand-made, etc. And yet many people don't have kids because they "can't afford it" which basically translates to "can't afford to maintain society's baseline consumption levels." I'm not blaming them, either - this is something that society pushes constantly. Going against that tide is extremely difficult.
Every problem with modern society becomes worse with more humans. We could cut per capita consumption in half and every additional human would still accelerate climate change.
I'm talking about cultural trends and consumerism.
> Every problem with modern society becomes worse with more humans.
No, not necessarily if enough people adopted a minimalist/low carbon emission lifestyle. More people would lead to it becoming a bigger social movement, thus making it more acceptable for 'regular' people to join.
The cost of renting what? It used to be considered normal for multiple people to share a room and for children to live with their parents (and grandparents) all under one roof until they got married.
Don’t get me wrong - I prefer living alone to having roommates, and certainly prefer having my own private room to sharing it with multiple other people. But this is a very modern expectation. If it were normal for 3-4 people to share a room (as was common in the past), I imagine rent prices would actually be lower today than historically.
In any case, rent is really only overinflated in coastal megacities. And rent wasn’t really my main target: there are a whole lot of modern consumption activities considered ‘essential’ which really aren’t in any sense, but have simply become social expectations.
In theory this will suck for you because the entire society is structured so that younger people support the old and reducing the number of people who have to support you is a terrible thing, especially if we continue to rise life expectancy (although suicide/accidents/drugs are doing a fine job at countering this in aggregate).
But there is no telling how things will pan out with economy in the future, to what extent will automation increase productivity, etc. Also if the anti-aging research comes through the productive age of individuals could be extended along with longer lifespan.
Whatever happens the environment argument is ridiculous, environment has always been unstable, life on earth has been hit by major cataclysmic events throughout the history - the only difference is that historically we couldn't do anything about it - which is changing significantly with technological development. If we don't start decoupling our survival odds from the environmental factors we are going to suffer as a society irregardless of what we do to environment.
Figuring out how to structure society in a way that doesn't require the young to outnumber the old is a band-aid the species will have to rip off eventually.
It isn't. The environment isn't unstable right now, it has relatively stable rate of change, and it's predictable. It's just getting worse for our survival as a population. We are using carbon based energy sources too quickly for the environment to follow the natural cycle to sequester it, and as a result we won't be able to feed the existing number of humans.
We cannot decouple survival odds from environmental factors. You show a lack of understanding of how food is made to think that is possible at current populations.
>You show a lack of understanding of how food is made to think that is possible at current populations.
On the timescale of declining birth rates affecting this - this is probably the simplest problem to solve - we have multiple ways reduce environmental impacts on food production with different levels of innovation/change required - from engineering resilient crops and using the same approach as we do now, over vertical farming in controlled environments (still producing the same food but with low surface requirement and isolation from environmental effects), all the way to producing essential nutrients from simple organisms large scale (eg. algae) (here we need to figure out a lot more about nutrition to provide reasonable healthy substitutes over complex food) - this is a matter of economics, scaling, research - not trivial but clearly possible.
Building cities able to withstand large scale environmental disasters like hurricanes and tsunamis, temperature control, isolation from air pollutants (eg. radioactive waste in the air), imposing strict bounds on entering/leaving to prevent viruses/bacteria from spreading (through humans and animals) - these are the kinds of things we will need to be able to do in the future - otherwise the next COVID, avian flue, Fukushima or global warming is going to leave us in a shit situation without any way of responding - we will be left in the same shit situation we are now - forced to hide and hope it goes away.
The single biggest problem is consumption of resources that are altering the parameters of nature such that they will be less hospitable to human life. At its base, almost all consumption requires fossil fuel due to its unbeatable properties of energy density, storage, versatility, ease of use, and cheap cost.
I don’t see how any idea which increases consumption (such as building cities and farms and whatever can help mitigate the more immediate problem of carbon emissions and other fossil fuel related pollution. Only solution I can see is reduction in consumption per capita (mainly in developed countries), and accompanying that is reduction of ”capita”s Aka reduction in population .
That argument is assuming nature is hospitable to human life by default and if we stop doing what we're doing everything will be fine...
Droughts can still cause famine and starvation in many parts of the world. Floods, hurricanes, earthquakes, vulcano eruptions, forest fires, localised disease (like lime disease) etc. all part of the natural disasters happening without human intervention. These are the small scale common occurrences that we still really don't have good ways of dealing with.
A lot of these are exacerbated by climate change - which is already in motion and there is very little proof that we can predict what will happen accurately, so even if we cut green house gas emissions to 0 - and that's not a realistic scenario - we're still going to have to deal with the consequences.
Then there are global outlier events that can be extinction level - meteor impact, deadly virus strains crossing from animals to humans and spread by animals (eg. bird flu - we're covering from COVID with IFR of sub 1% which is largely targeting old people past average age of death - bird flue IFR was close to 50% and spread by birds which aren't so easy to contain - imagine if the transmission was easier). Again 0 human intervention required, have historical precedent, just not frequent enough to worry about when you have more pressing issues.
In any realistic scenario we will be living in a world were local actions can have global impact - nuclear disaster can spread radiation between continents, virus originating in one place can spread globally and we have no containment units, climate change is going to make the weather more volatile and many natural disasters are going to become more frequent and it can destroy currently hospitable areas, etc.
Nature is not great by default, and we're already on a path that will make it less hospitable - the only realistic long term solution I see is learning to live in that environment.
To your first point. I think contraction economics (the study of economics under declining populations) would be a great area to enter right about now.
I think it is good if the decline happens at a steady rate rather than a sudden drop which will create an imbalance between the number of elderly folks who need support and a younger generation who could provide that support.
this is happening! Check out “Empty Planet: the Shock of Global Population Decline”. They predict a peak in _global_ population around 2050. The same cultural change is happening world-wide: people are having fewer children, and they’re having them later.
Except that it will probably barely move the needle. The US's contribution to world population growth is negligible compared to Africa's or parts of Asia.
That being said, this focus on "population" always sounds a little wrong to me. It's not about how many people are alive, it's about the consumption of resources per person. And by this metric, yes, the US is probably the worst offender. But here is the thing, will childless household/individuals consume less than families?
Nope. As outlined in another comment, it will be travel and consumption for the sake of the individual, with no thought for what happens to society in 5 decades. Supposedly everything will be fine, since they didn’t “spawn” a “carbon consumer,” and the only problem we face is carbon. It is selfish.
It's almost as if humans consume as many resources as their circumstances allow... We are at global carrying capacity, it just isn't some optimal theoretical limit but one defined by political, historical, and ecological factors.
It's really the height of hubris to lecture strangers on whether or not they should make the very personal and life long commitment to having children.
Most western countries are below population replacement fertility rate of 2.1. This also include China at 1.7 and India almost there at 2.2. The countries in Africa are still up there though but they will go down also.
I think there are pros and cons. You mention some of the pros. Right now I think the ideal population growth would be slightly below replacement level for a while, and then replacement level once we hit a population that seems to "work."
You can't ignore the social problems created by shrinking populations though. A major one is monopolization of high positions in business and politics by an increasingly elderly class that is stuck in an obsolete way of thinking. In America this has given birth to the quip "ok, boomer."
I don't like sounding age-ist, but it does seem as if most people stop updating their understanding of the world at some point in their 40s. I don't think it's that older people can't learn. My grandfather taught himself computer programming, called BBSes (at 300 baud!), learned digital/TTL electronics, and learned all kinds of other new stuff in his 60s. It's just that most people don't do this. I think it might be an ego thing. People decide they know it all at some point and stop learning or changing their opinions.
It could also have less to do with age than with age plus status. High status people rarely seem to make drastic revisions to their world view because their brain stem is telling them everything they're doing is working. (At least this is the mechanism I suspect exists. It would have survival value to some extent.) So you get entrenched older managerial and political classes that double, triple, and quadruple down on failing policies because the failure has not affected them yet.
A second problem is that virtually every society on Earth today uses growth to paper over a range of systemic failings. Instead of dealing with inequality, we use growth. Instead of getting rid of moribund industries we use growth to make new ones while keeping the old stuff around. Growth really does avoid the need to confront a lot of very messy problems. Recent political history has not inspired confidence in me that we can confront these problems any more rationally than people in the past.
The tipping point I'm looking at is when kindred.ai, covariant.ai, google, or similar player nails manipulation. Give me a set of hands that can reliably perform a task in a semi-structured environment 24/7 at 65% the speed of a human and 1B people will be out of work in a decade.
This will further increase the wealth of a few and raise the standards of living for many which will increase their rates of consumption. I'd like to see the population decline to balance this expected increase in consumption.
As for the gerontocracy problem, the easier it is for me to earn enough live the less I have to worry about who is in charge.
I agree with you. I don't think the planet can sustain more than about 4B people. As the third world countries get better health care and have better infant mortality, their rates will continue to drop. Additionally, robotics are going to continue to reduce our need for people to do stuff for other people.
A big problem with that is long lifetimes and nice non-poverty level retirements basically require that there be more young people to support the older population in retirement because most people do not make enough to pay for their own retirement through savings.
Retirement savings is irrelevant. No one saves for retirement by stockpiling cans of food. They save for retirement by stockpiling financial assets that can be exchanged for food when they are retired. They need just as much of a workforce to produce this food if they pay for it through savings as they would if it was provided through a socialist government program.
If everyone who retired has "adequate" savings, but their is not a large enough workforce to support them, you will see their buying power fall. Also possible is their buying power would remain, and the buying power of the young workforce would fall as a greater share of goods produced go to retired folks who hoarded financial capital when it was cheaper to do so.
You're just talking about food, if we were willing to just let the elderly fall to poverty level subsistence it's much easier but that's poverty level which is not what I want in my old age or for anyone in their old age. We grew beyond that as a society for the most part lets not go back to it. There's medical bills, housing (for those who don't own their homes, which will be an increasing percentage as housing prices climb and people keep renting longer), and recreation.
> If everyone who retired has "adequate" savings, but their is not a large enough workforce to support them, you will see their buying power fall. Also possible is their buying power would remain, and the buying power of the young workforce would fall as a greater share of goods produced go to retired folks who hoarded financial capital when it was cheaper to do so.
That's another reason where you need either a larger working population or a vast excess that gets redistributed to support retirees.
I was using food as an example because you could, in principle, stockpile cans of it.
I suppose you could argue that some people do stockpile housing for retirement. However, other than that, all they are doing is stockpiling a claim on future productivity. As a matter of policy, we could give every old person such a claim regardless of their savings.
We could and unless something drastically changes in the way the economy is structured that's going to come in the form of giving them money (or goods bought with money) from taxes paid by the working population... As the ratio increases that requires more support from each working person.
I don't think it's been proven that human or even earth life is the most effective method the universe has come up with to look at itself. Humans appear to be good at recording the universe's happenings but I haven't seen solid evidence that the record is important on a galactic time scale.
It could be a good thing if we didn't have an economy-- in particular, retirement and health care schemes-- that essentially requires a pyramidal population distribution, and collapses if it goes inverted. We should be working to fix that, but if the inversion happens before the change does, we could be in real trouble.
I mean, I agree, but "just" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. I've had to accept that there's a finite amount of immigration that societies will take before you get a nativist backlash, and that amount appears to be much lower than the amount you need to sustain a healthy demographic pyramid. All the Vox articles in the world about how immigration is a net economic positive don't seem to have made a difference. I don't like it, but you have to work with the political situation you have, not the one you wish you had.
Why would the immigrants have any allegiance to the US? If you try to force more immigrants in than can be properly vetted for assimilation, then you're going to get Sharia Law slums and the Irish/Russian/Italian mafia all over again.
Should we incentivize our own population to breed or ship in foreigners wholesale? Seems like self-subversion to opt for the latter.
You may not know this, but the native american population in the US is <2% of the total population. If you are part of that <2%, I understand your bitterness.
The other 98% of americans are immigrants or the children/grandchildren/great grandchildren/etc. of immigrants.
Some of my ancestors immigrated from Ireland and Italy to the US, but despite that, I've decided to work in software engineering instead of the mafia.
You're wrong. The US isn't an ethnostate. It's a group of individuals who believe in a core set of values and ideals. Letting too many in risks letting in those who have no affinity to the US Constitution. It has nothing to do with genetic heritage.
98% of the population are immigrants or the descendents of immigrants.
The people who wrote the US Constitution were immigrants or the descendents of immigrants.
All the presidents, including the current one, have been the descendents of immigrants.
The US Constitution has survived this reality for 200+ years.
I realize some people, like my aunt (whose grandfather was an italian immigrant), want to pretend there is a difference between immigrants coming to america today and those who came 50, 100, 200, 300 years ago. But the difference is primarily in her mind, and now she treats new immigrants the way her grandfather was treated by people who decided italians should not be welcome in america.
It seems to be a constant tension here that I don't expect to every really go away.
I'm sure in countries without immigration people find other things to use to classify each other into groups that are convenient to dislike and scapegoat.
Have you looked at the population distribution? To make the 60+ brackets go inverted would require a remarkable improvement in life-extending medical technology. It narrows pretty fast at retirement age.
It's tremendous news. The carrying capacity of the Earth is closed to 1 billion people (we're at ~7 billion, and on track to hit ~10 billion by the end of the century due to population momentum). Target total fertility rate should be as close to 1 as possible.
This is a subject near and dear to my heart as a systems observation wonk, and have done a tremendous amount of research on the subject.
I recommend these two books to those interested:
Shrinking-population Economics: Lessons From Japan by Akihiko Matsutani
Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth? by Alan Weisman
What does "carrying capacity" in this case mean? I've seen various numbers quoted on this and they all seem somewhat suspect to me. Humans improve the world for ourselves through work. As time progresses we get better at it and solve various problems. It's not like us consuming resources actually makes the resources disappear from Earth. They're still there, but they simply need more work to be done to be made useful. We extract new resources because it's cheaper, but at some point that'll change. Hopefully that's so far in the future that it's a challenge that's easily met.
Some resources are by definition are not sustainable. Fossil fuels are the best example, since they represent compressed biomass that takes millions of years to produce.
The most worrying resource that isn't usually thought of are ecosystem services. The ocean produces an abundance of wild caught food, but also various cycles provide oxygen, consume co2, and coral reefs buffer shorelines against erosion. We degrade those systems with abandon, but they represent trillions in services that likely can't just be replaced with technology.
>but they represent trillions in services that likely can't just be replaced with technology.
Why not? We probably have a lot of time before they become seriously unavailable. The Earth is huge. Imagine if all oxygen production on Earth stopped tomorrow. We would still have enough oxygen in the atmosphere that would last 1000 years at current consumption (obviously you couldn't live for a 1000 years though). Humanity has progressed immensely in the last 200 years. I can't imagine where we will be in 500.
"the carrying capacity of the Earth is closed to 1 billion people" This is FUD. The carrying capacity of earth is determined by the ingenuity of humanity. It can go poorly for the environment or not, but considering it purely a function of the number of people is Malthusian hogwash.
Sure, and if you're skilled, you can disarm a bomb before it explodes. You're ingenious as a species, but you're still dead. The data does not show that on our current trajectory, we are going to disarm the bomb. Even with COVID-19, we're unable to reduce CO2 emissions to levels needed to avert climate change, without going on ad nauseam about natural resource exhaustion (fish stocks continue to be depleted [1], rapidly exhausting phosphorus reserves for fertilizer [2] and fossil aquifers for agriculture [3], etc).
800 million people out of 7.6 billion are chronically undernourished [4] and your argument is we can still support more people? At what point do people get real that we are burning the gas faster than we can fill the gas tank of the ecosystem engine? Hope is not a strategy, and we are not so ingenuous if we already have so many people struggling to survive. Less people over time (total fertility rate stepdown), less demand on world resources, less suffering. It's that simple.
Mmm, the phosphorus reserves are doing better than a lot of other ressources. Its trues that _US_ reserves have peaked and will be exhausted soon, but currently China and Australia (from memory) are exporting currently half the world consumption and still have not peaked, while the place with the most reserves should be Morocco [0].
Anyway e is growing and will always be (unless our universe is not isolated) and we will all die even if we manage to: save our planet/move out of our planet/move out of our solar system/move out of our galaxy.
I realise that i argued against your point even though i'm quite agreeing with it. Oh well, precision do not hurt anyone.
Nor have I, it sounds fairly arbitrary to me. I don't think a global society that's structured the proper way need have a maximum population limit. If energy becomes cheaper and cheaper, like with breakthroughs in solar, wind, nuclear, storage, fusion, then it seems to me we could easily support 10 billion people's food and resource needs, given a circular economy which is highly efficient. There's also asteroid mining, carbon capture, vertical farming, high density living like in Asia...there are a lot of efficiencies to be gained in how our population lives.
It's interesting to think about. For instance, how much space do we need per capita? If we were to pack everyone together giving each a 2ft by 2ft space, the current population would take up the space of a large county or two. That's rather fascinating to think about because it isn't a large amount of space. Obviously it isn't sustainable, but our physical size is small. But then you start factoring in food, shelter, water, mental well-being, etc... It would just be interesting to find out how much space we really need per capita thinking along those lines.
It's referenced in the Countdown book I mention, which includes citations. The author excludes the book from the Internet Archive OpenLibrary, so I can't directly cite the page. I'll have to reply back later when I can grab the book and find the page and citation it refers back to.
Anecdotal: Many folks in my social circles are just less willing to accept the real responsibility of raising a child. We're all late-20-somethings/early 30-somethings and I have the conversation all the time with people who want to wait until things like careers are established, until they have a chance to seriously travel a bit, and most commonly they just want to enjoy a relationship without the stress of kids. Kids are an insanely huge responsibility, and to parent right all of your life priorities change completely.
Also, with religious stresses being almost non-existent in the groups I run in I feel like people aren't jumping into legally-binding marriages which causes the baby thing to be pushed down the road until they find someone they want to forge a lifelong relationship with. I think it's a super good thing when people take their time to find the right relationship for them!
All-in-all I've noticed a big generational gap in thinking on this one because all I hear from tons of older relatives is "sooo when you guys getting married?" ...or even pushing for children before the fact. It feels unnatural and downright weird to field those questions and it's neigh impossible to explain "we're just taking our time to enjoy this thing and not rushing into huge commitments with marriage or kids..."
We're just taking our time trying to do the right thing for us really... I just wish people would stop calling us selfish for that.
I'm a little older, and while I wouldn't be worried about what strangers think about your choices, you may find your own perspective change if you have kids.
I know in my circle of friends and favily, we waited longer than we wanted do due to things out of our control, but ended up being about "average" age for having a first child in our circle. Many of our circle who waited until late 30s/early 40s are very torn up with having waited, as the reality that they are going to miss certain things sets in.
Life moves fast, and our modern world tends to make you prioritize things that don't really matter. Your relatives may be annoying, but in most cases, they are probably trying to express how they grew to feel. From my personal pov, watching or working with my 8 year old isn't some obligation that I have to do, it's incredible and more relevant to me that some stupid IT project that I'll barely remember in 10 years.
If I come off as preachy, I don't intend it and apologize. I just found that the "eyeroll factor" for how 39 year old me sees 29 year old me was much higher than how 29 year old me looked back at 19 year old me!
Interesting, 26 year old me was willing to have children some day, 31 year old me was contemplating maybe having kids some day when he gets bored with life, 36 year old me never wants children, is married to someone who never wants children, had a vasectomy, and is still kinda afraid it will fail and he might end up with a kid.
The longer I live and look around the more I realize how annoying and life-ruining kids would be for me. And, while there may be many couples that are happier with kids, the ones that stick out for me are (also many) that either visibly have worse QoL, less happy marriages, etc., and the ones that visibly have stockholm syndrome.
Wow, that is so me. Couldn't wait to get kids in university, just didn't have a partner to do it with. When I met my partner, our lives were not stable enough to support kids in a monetary and emotional sense. Not that we are, I'm mid thirties, see the lack of sleep of friends that do have kids and seriously doubt whether it is worth it.
Somehow I feel we've designed the way we do careers to oppose certain natural processes. I'm not even female, I can't imagine how much uphill the battle is for them.
Interestingly, my experience is exactly opposite. Most of my friends started having kids in late 20's / early 30's and every single one of them is incredibly happy to have them; in fact, some even lament that they didn't have kids sooner.
Well, most might indeed be, but for some, 3 factors I can think of are that...
1) the QoL/unhappy people I notice are mostly due to financial situation - if your friends are all in tech it won't apply; or the fact that one of the parents switched their focus completely onto children and neglects their spouse (and it's not always the wife)
2) you may not know some of them closely enough or see them in regular life. It's not socially acceptable to regret having children or admit it sucks, by word or action.
3) Many are obvious cases of stockholm syndrome.
The most obvious example (rare, but imo symptomatic for everyone) is when people say they are blessed to experience having a child with severe disability. I always want to ask (but never will), would you have wished for such a blessing before the kid was born, if given a choice? I could believe someone who says it sucks in many ways but worth it, but when someone claims to feel "blessed" in these circumstances... sure, suit yourself :)
A less obvious one is when people tell you it's great and there are no downsides. Again I can believe people who say they are happy despite the tradeoffs, but sometimes people tell you there basically no downsides to kids; and 3 minutes before/after will tell you how they would like to pick up their abandoned hobbies, how their health is deteriorating due to lack of exercise, they cannot work from home due to distractions, haven't had time for sex in 3 months, haven't slept properly in 3 weeks, ... but there are no downsides!
> Many are obvious cases of stockholm syndrome. The most obvious example (rare, but imo symptomatic for everyone) is when people say they are blessed to experience having a child with severe disability. I always want to ask (but never will), would you have wished for such a blessing before the kid was born, if given a choice? I could believe someone who says it sucks in many ways but worth it, but when someone claims to feel "blessed" in these circumstances... sure, suit yourself :)
Obviously no parent would wish for a child to be born with a disability. A less cynical and self-centered take on the situation might be that the love and ability to nuture and help that child with challenges has meaningful, unexpected rewards.
> A less obvious one is when people tell you it's great and there are no downsides. Again I can believe people who say they are happy despite the tradeoffs, but sometimes people tell you there basically no downsides to kids; and 3 minutes before/after will tell you how they would like to pick up their abandoned hobbies, how their health is deteriorating due to lack of exercise, they cannot work from home due to distractions, haven't had time for sex in 3 months, haven't slept properly in 3 weeks, ... but there are no downsides!
You're attributing this to kids. People don't just drop all hobbies, stop taking care of themselves, stop having sex or sleeping because a child shows up.
If that all happens, it reflects a level of immaturity and lack of planning that would cause a problem in the face of any adversity.
Agree with your first point - all my friends are in tech with decent incomes.
Disagree about people claiming there are no downsides - people I've seen generally accept the "cost" of kids (monetary, physical, personal etc). But the benefits of kids seem to be outweighing these costs. I agree with you that it is not socially acceptable to regret having kids, so some of them might be lying. Only speaking for myself, I am pretty happy.
And lastly, there is another factor to add to your analysis - the culture. Almost all my friends are immigrants to the US, coming from countries with much higher birth rates and very different attitudes about family or having kids.
I'm 40 and my youngest is 3. By the time he's an adult, I'll be 55. If he has kids at 40, I'll be 77 and will never really know his kids, let alone see them grow up.
I'd never recommend having kids at 18 but looking more and more like 25-30 is the "right" age.
no matter what, there will be an n+1 generation of your offspring that you will never meet. my dad was a few years older than you when I (the first child) was born. he'll probably never know my children as adults or meet his great-grandchildren. on the other hand, having a well-established career at the time, he was able to provide much more for my brother and me than he could have if he were 25-30. maybe the material stuff doesn't matter so much, but he had also attained a lot of flexibility in his work schedule by that age. despite being a very busy person, he was able to walk us to school every day and roll into the office around 11am ("flexible hours" generally did not exist in his line of work at the time). he was also able to retire before my brother finished middle school, so he was around for much more of our late childhood than other dads. now I'm in the early phase of my own career and I can get advice from someone who's already lived through a full cycle.
My father lived to 86, and got to know his grandchildren. The youngest was born when he was 64, the youngest when he was 69. I guess it depends on what you mean "really know".
64 and 77 are pretty far apart. At 86, the grandkid would then be 9 years old.
My dad lived to be 86, and my kids are 7 & 9. There definitely wasn't enough time to form a deep relationship. He enjoyed their company, but they weren't too interested in getting to know him, and in the final few years of his life he was slowing down considerably so it's easy to understand why. He was 77 when my daughter was born, just like the example from GP.
I was vacationing in Spain and made friends with my Airbnb hosts: they invited me over for dinners in their house. He was 73 and his biological son was 6 or 7. The boy looked very bright. His wife was I think 44.
I often feel like this is frowned upon in the US, while in many countries it’s completely normal. Of course in the US the famous and the rich get a pass.
I’m pushing 50 and haven’t had kids. I want to and expect to, probably in a couple years. I tell myself I’ll be starting my first family at the age where many people start their second.
Any healthy child raised with love is a huge plus in the universe.
I'm aware of this -- obviously nature wants you to get breeding early, but I would argue that you should weigh the risks and the benefits, including benefits to the kids based on your ability to be good parents.
This is probably[0] an even bigger consideration for women[1] but in many societies that's not stopping them from having kids in their late 40's.
I guess I wasn't clear in my post: I think the US frowns on significant age differences (>10y maybe?) in relationships, with exceptions for the rich and famous who are expected to do what they want. Probably other societies share this prejudice. Many do not. I have no idea whether this prejudice extends to children.
[0]: based on common assumptions, and Wikipedia for lack of a better source right now.
"it's incredible and more relevant to me that some stupid IT project that I'll barely remember in 10 years."
You are comparing your kids to your IT projects. Maybe you should instead compare it to things you really are passionate about in life. If you don't have those then it certainly makes sense how children could have easily filled that void.
A quick post doesn't capture nuance well for something like this. My peers felt alot of pressure to advance careers very quickly.
Especially women. My cousin is a physician, so basically lost her 20s completely to work. Even being in a relationship almost felt irresponsible to her for a long time because of the pressures and the potential to move anywhere in the country.
A good friend ended up being a high-flyer at a big consulting company -- he always wanted what was over the next hill from a career point of view, and that impacted his relationships.
You're describing my Uncle. Went to college, got married, got the corporate job and started working his way up aggressively. And wife divorced him because he wasn't there there. All his GF's eventually went away for the same reason. He's retired now. Not really anyone spend day to day with.
You got it the wrong way around IMO. It's those other things that "fill the void" from not having children. Having children, for most people, is basically the most meaningful and lasting thing they can possibly do with their lives. Nothing else is even in the same order of magnitude.
I think it's deeply patronizing and bordering on armchair psychology to assert that people who fully commit themselves to something that isn't having children as just "filling the void".
I've always seen it the other way around. People start families and have children prematurely because it's a trivial way to create meaning and dependency and something to fall back on.
Instead of seeing other pursuits as compensation for having children I feel the family is often the compensation or a sort of insurance in contrast to doing something completely on your own, which is a much scarier thing in many ways.
> I think it's deeply patronizing and bordering on armchair psychology to assert
The reverse assertion is even more so, IMO. It's also an evolutionary dead end. Your extensive postage stamp collection is not going to move humanity forward.
as one other poster has pointed out this seems like a silly strawman. Meaningful goals involve scientific pursuits, artistic pursuits, leading organisations or being engaged in a community, not collecting postage stamps.
In fact these are the things that move humanity forward, it's not reproduction that advances human culture in any meaningful way. Isaac Newton didn't have children, but of course his contribution to human society is imeasurable.
Evolution of human society isn't led by biological reproduction, it's led by cultural reproduction.
The trouble with counterfactual history is that it's very easy to come up with one's own version. What if, for example, Newton's parents never had children? Or what if they never had children, but someone other than Newton invented the same, or better, things? And from there it quickly branches out to things that are combinatorially incomprehensible.
At a macro level, fertility ratio below 2 (much more than 2 at the time, actually, since a lot of children died, but 2 is more self-explanatory) in Newton's England, however, would mean that England as we know it today would not exist, and some other nation that procreates better but perhaps doesn't value math and science as much, would take its place. From there: no computers, no United States, no Internet or Moon landings, different outcomes in several large scale wars. Pretty catastrophic, if you ask me.
Attachment theory suggests that our moral underpinning comes from doing what is best for the child.
And the morality of attachment theory is challenging at all stages of life. Having the child is necessary but insufficient to do good. Letting the child relish in uncontrolled impulses is good now and bad later. And so on.
In light of that any assertion of having children being defacto good or not is incomplete without describing the overall society. Evolution is a strawman in this sense; our children do not immediately enter some Darwinian gladiatorial arena of genetic destiny. They are going to sample from the best examples they can find of how to live, and friends, extended families, and ideas echoed through time(as communicated orally, in books and other mediums) all play a part of that. It's not all on the parent, and if it's not all on the parent, then childless adults have a place, an "ought to do something for the child", even if they are not writing King Lear or inventing calculus.
People should have kids when they are ready, if they are ready. One thing those with kids that are actively encouraging you to have them don't tell you is that life as you knew it is pretty much over. This can be a positive or a negative. I have 2 kids that I very much love and am very grateful to have, the oldest being 8 now. I have been exhausted for 8 years. Everything changes. Even something as simple as running out to the food store means rounding the kids up, finding shoes, finding water bottles, getting them in the car, strapping the youngest one in the car seat. Driving to the store while the kids full on fight about the youngest saying he does not like the oldest's favorite color. Getting to the store, having to say no 15 times to everything they pass and want (plastic dinosaur bowels with built in straw). Waiting in line, having to tell them constantly to stop picking up the candy in the checkout line, etc.
There are definitely great moments, throwing the ball in the yard, hugs, conversations etc. But these don't detract from the overall exhaustion. I would still choose to have my kids every time if provided the option as I love them and could not imagine not having them but don't let anyone talk you into something you are not ready for.
The problem comes on the other side.. the later you decide to have kids, the more risks involved. For women, risks are low until ~35 or so and get much higher around 40. FTA:
> The NCHS data also showed that the share of babies born preterm last year hit its highest level in more than a decade, with just over 1-in-10 being born before 37 weeks of gestation.
Having experienced that, it's not something I'd wish on anyone.
> You can also accept the responsibility of dying childless. It might be lonely and problematic in other ways. It might even make your life shorter.
Might make your life longer and happier too. Obviously it depends on personal circumstances.
> I wish people would understand that kids are not only responsibility, but also joy, and help. So the grass is not really greener on the either side.
I think most people _do_ understand that. I would hope that you understand that depending on the circumstances, that joy and help may _not_ outweigh the responsibility and hardships.
> I would hope that you understand that depending on the circumstances, that joy and help may _not_ outweigh the responsibility and hardships.
It's not really my problem, as I am an anatalist. :-) But I do find the prospect of dying childless somewhat scary. (I have only one brother who is not going to have children either.) If it wasn't for the global warming (and general ecological destruction), I would very much want to have kids.
I’m just gonna be blunt here: opting out of having children for the sake of the environment is incredibly shortsighted. Fixing the environment is a collective action problem. Emphasis on collective: it will take many people working on it directly, advocating for it, voting for it, etc. Opting to not have children just handicaps your cause by removing future people who would likely end up on your team.
Don’t do it!
Make some babies. Raise them to be good people. The world will be a slightly better place for it. And your life will be made immeasurably better by the purpose and meaning that children bestow upon it.
I think I already responded to all this elsewhere in this discussion. I can only accept that making children is useful to solve the problem, if I see any single example of somebody who has actually done it. Somebody, who decided to have kids with the sole purpose of raising future geniuses to solve this particular problem, and considered the trade-off (because inaction has a cost too). Where it wasn't just a convenient excuse for your own inaction in the matter. (Besides, I think imposing your desires, however good they might be, onto your children is morally wrong.)
Looking at my own example, this is false. My grandfather (who died when I was 15) was a chemical engineer, and a big fan of renewable energy. Possibly he thought the same - my generation will be the one that solves these problems. But what did I do? I work at a SW company, because it pays well. I have a rather modest lifestyle, but I can't really say I would be working on an individual solution either. So here we are - 40 years of procrastination.
I ultimately think that "they will solve the problem" is wishful thinking. There is no problem to be solved, the problem is that we (as humanity) need to stop expanding our energy needs. Whether we do it by limiting population or limiting consumption or both, doesn't really matter. But I don't think there is any problem that remains to be solved.
The problem is pure and simple, procrastination. And it won't be solved by procreation.
I’m not arguing that you’ll have kids who will directly solve the problem. Instead, I am making a statistical argument. Here’s what I said in another reply:
> The carrying capacity of the earth will be reached whether you have children or not. So the consideration is different: whose descendants will take up that carrying capacity. If you, as a person concerned about the environment, opt to have children, then, statistically speaking, you are biasing the future composition of the human population toward being more concerned about the environment (since your kids share you innate predispositions and will be raised in the familial and cultural milieu that you create for them). And if people who are concerned about the environment systematically choose to not have children because they have become infected by this meme, then you have a situation where the future composition of the human population is becoming more biased toward doing nothing about the environment. So not having kids is a losing strategy.
In any case, I think I already addressed it. Humans are not just mindless meme carriers, they have a mind on their own.
And if you're considering it statistically, then that argument seems even more like an excuse. If everybody expects that someone else will do a job (save the planet), but nobody actually makes a step towards that job (educating somebody to save it, or doing whatever else towards it), then the work simply doesn't get done.
Remember, at the end of the day, concerns do not matter, only actions. We already have enough humans who are concerned.
Agree that actions matter. But if there is a meme (having kids is bad for the environment) that is systematically removing people who are more likely to take action, then less action with be taken.
This is simply false. The greatest effect you as an individual can, realistically, have on climate change is to choose not to have children. Through the magic of exponential growth it outweighs basically every other choice e.g. veganism, biking rather than driving, buying local etc.
Exponential growth works in the other direction as well: if you have no children, you are freeing up resources to provide for other people’s children. And other people will continue having children (see your own argument about exponential growth).
I'm having a hard time here, what exactly are you arguing? Resources are finite and I can't control other people.
Should I increase the strain on an already overburdened system because other peoples future descendants might use those resources otherwise? I presume that I am misreading your point because that seems... ill founded.
The carrying capacity of the earth will be reached whether you have children or not. So the consideration is different: whose descendants will take up that carrying capacity. If you, as a person concerned about the environment, opt to have children, then, statistically speaking, you are biasing the future composition of the human population toward being more concerned about the environment (since your kids share you innate predispositions and will be raised in the familial and cultural milieu that you create for them). And if people who are concerned about the environment systematically choose to not have children because they have become infected by this meme, then you have a situation where the future composition of the human population is becoming more biased toward doing nothing about the environment. So not having kids is a losing strategy.
Most western countries have substantially higher emissions per capita[1] than most of the developing world. Hence, the concern about the effects of Africa/India/others standards of living increasing since it is likely to correspond with an increase in emissions.
Everything is heritable, including political beliefs.
You've made the next generation care slightly less on average about global warming. Maybe your kids would have been more intelligent than the global average of ~90 IQ and helped work on or pay for solutions.
> You can also accept the responsibility of dying childless. It might be lonely and problematic in other ways.
Who am I to impose my degrading health/inevitable death onto someone else? I say this having dealt with both of my parent's deaths already.
I come from a long family history of mental illness, addiction, abuse, and just some general heinous stuff. Passing my daily struggle along to someone to avoid dying childless seems so selfish to me... to the point that I'd feel pretentious even considering that as a reason TO have children.
What I'm trying to say is it's just not as simple as that for many people. I've also accepted that I will likely die alone and just don't care - I've volunteered at nursing homes and EOL is miserable for everyone. Doing anything so people give a f about me down the line just seems incredibly selfish.
This is why I push for assisted suicidal wherever possible. I would not like to be a burden on anyone else in old age, and if I get to that point I would want to put myself out of my misery. Easier said than done of course.
Another way to look at this is that as dual careers have become a necessity, the economy has become so brutally competitive that it has become biologically insufficient for reproducing the working class. There's an element of choice in upper middle class careers, but for most of the population there is no choice.
Children are a result of sufficient resources being present (time, energy, supports, and money). Those things are being stripped from us by the employer class.
In terms of lack of supports, for example, the United States is one of the only advanced economies without free child care. The right wing is attempting to strip away public education. The physical process of having a child costs thousands of dollars, and sometimes they charge for letting the mother hold her baby right after it is born. Housing requires dual incomes in order to live in a place near jobs that isn't either a slum or too cramped.
There's a huge trade-off that you're missing. Fertility drops rapidly in your 30s, especially for women. I'm middle aged and know many women who waited but were unable to conceive.
"Every study you read or expert you consult will agree that 35 is a milestone for women when it comes to having children. In your early 30s, your chances of getting pregnant are only slightly lower than in your late 20s, and your risk of having a miscarriage or a baby with Down syndrome is only slightly higher. But at 35, that decline in fertility begins to accelerate."
Sure it might take more effort than say mid-twenties, fertility tracking/treatments, etc. But it can be done. And before 35 is certainly doable.
If there's one thing I'm grateful to my parents for it's my education. Life in the 21st century requires much higher complexity to achieve similar economic/social success to previous generations, and not just on the technological front. Those with the tools to solve complex problems will do fine, those who lack said tools are going to be bitterly disappointed across most aspects of life, unless we somehow bring back unskilled labor as a middle class profession.
It’s selfish in the same way that not giving away most of your lifetime earnings to a stranger is selfish. You could call that selfish, but you’d be in scarce company.
This analogy is false, it's nothing like that at all. Giving or not giving up earnings is a massive change in your life. Having an adopted child or your own child is no change whatsoever other than some hormonal high for yourself; for the rest of the society/environment, adding a first world child is actually a negative.
If you want a funny analogy, a better one would be giving $1000 to charity (adoption) or giving $500 to charity, setting $250 worth of coal on fire and using $250 to buy weed so you could feel good about that all (your own kid).
I'm not sure what to say. We are biological beings and, as such, we are the result of evolution. The vast majority of us prefer our close relatives and, especially, our children by definition. There is no other state of affairs that can obtain. If you want to argue that people who fall in line with this are selfish, then fine. But that is not typically how the word is used. It is typically used to denote people who act selfishly above and beyond the baseline level of preference that we all have for our relatives, friends, and other parochial relations.
Evolution by this rather simplistic understanding also would drive (and does drive) people to usurp maximum resources for themselves and their progeny - so, to do everything from hoarding to nepotism, self-dealing and corruption - basically, the definition of selfishness.
Usually, when pretending that child-rearing is not selfish (and IMO it's more selfish than paragliding or eating cake), people refer to making sacrifices towards the child; but that is satisfied by adoption.
There is a difference between an action being selfish in an absolute sense and an action being more selfish than some alternative action. Having your own children is more selfish than adopting children. But neither is selfish.
There's no such thing as selfish in absolute sense, it would still be relative to some threshold. It's the only metric that matters in this case - you have a choice to have your own kid or adopt, you have your own kid. Your motivation for this specific choice is strictly selfish.
I'm not saying it's bad - it's your choice. But, don't preach about selflessness like most pro-natalists do; I climb rocks, and I don't preach about it even though it's less selfish (by harm done) than having kids.
Okay, starting from the beginning, because we’ve gotten sidetracked here. This is your original comment:
> Doesn't that mean that having children is basically selfish?
You were not originally making the point that having your own children was selfish compared to adopting. You were stating that it was selfish, in and of itself. Basically selfish. I still maintain that it is not, and I don’t believe you have actually argued successfully that it is. The main argument you seem to be making is that, because having your own children is more selfish than adopting, that makes it selfish in a general sense, since those are the only two options. But another option when it comes to reproducing is not having any children at all. And I can’t really see how you can argue that having your own children is more selfish than not having any children at all, since having children involves giving another person the chance to be alive at great personal cost and not having children involves no personal sacrifice and no other person getting the chance to be alive.
So the only viable position that remains is to say that having your own children is more selfish than adopting. If that’s your position, then we are in agreement.
That might have been a poor choice of words. I said across 2 posts separated by the response "Couldn't one adopt and have the same experience?" ... "Doesn't that mean that having children is basically selfish?". In context, by "is basically selfish", I meant (I guess it's not 100% clear) "given adoption is possible, on top of/instead of is ...".
But what you’re trying to argue is that something becomes selfish as long as there is any alternative action which is less selfish. Which is a ridiculous position to hold. By that reasoning, if you wanted to donate money to support your child’s school, it would be selfish because you didn’t donate it to some random school instead. Or if you spent most of your volunteer time helping elderly members of your own faith congregation, it would be selfish because you could have been helping random elderly people.
Sure, if you donate to your church so that it could put in cushier pillows on the benches or host a seminar about the bible, instead of donating to some effective cause that say saves lives, it's selfish to a significant degree.
My main point though is that pro-natalists should really stop pressing the "it's selfless"/"not having children is selfish" angle, because in the 1st world it's the opposite, and if selflessness played any part in the decision adopting would be a logical step.
In your analogy, if you donate a bunch to a church led by a pastor whose brother is your boss at work, as opposed to some other church, the donation is "less selfish" than not donating, but it makes your entire motivation credibly suspect.
> In your analogy, if you donate a bunch to a church led by a pastor whose brother is your boss at work,
No. This is not my analogy. This is further stipulation that you've added to my analogy that changes the moral calculus completely. My analogy is just volunteering your time to help old people at your church. By your reasoning, this would be considered selfish because you are choosing to patronize members of your own church with your good works, rather than random people.
> My main point though is that pro-natalists should really stop pressing the "it's selfless"/"not having children is selfish"
FWIW, there are plenty of people making the argument that having children is selfish (our exchange here being a good example of such). What do you expect people to do when you call the single most important endeavor of their life, which entails massive amounts of personal sacrifice, basically selfish? And, truly, to call having children selfish shows that you have essentially no conception of what parenting entails.
If you want to argue that it's irresponsible because children have an environmental impact, then I still think you're wrong, but you're not preposterously wrong. Just subtly wrong (IMO).
“Daly and Wilson found stepparenthood is the strongest risk factor for child abuse ever identified..a stepparent is 40-100 times more likely to kill a young child, even when confounding factors— poverty, mother’s age, traits of people who tend to remarry—are taken into account"
Okay? That doesn't really support toasterlovin's claim that:
>Nope. Most people will never care about someone else’s child the way they’ll care about their own flesh and blood.
Stepparenthood implies a myriad of confounding factors, not the least of which are, a) death of a parent or b) Divorce.
Upon further investigation, the link you posted does not contain the quote you posted, nor does searching the quoted text show return any results on either DuckDuckGo or Google. It is possible that this is a typographical error.
It’s not completely unrelated. It’s just not exactly the same. But I’m not sure what to tell you,
since you seem to have no real understanding of basic human nature. You should talk to people about how they feel about other people’s kids. It will be illuminating for you.
You’re doing the equivalent of asking me to provide evidence that the sky is blue. We are biological organisms who are capable of recognizing our young. There is no plausible way that we could have evolved to not prefer our own children over others. If your stance is that we don’t have such a preference, you need to provide the evidence, because you are the one taking the outlandish position.
It's still doable with enough effort. My best friend at 32 was able to conceive even with medical issues that would make it near impossible. It took 2 years but it happened.
Your anecdote does not prove that effort is what's required. 32 is still a good age but as the numbers go up effort is not what makes this happen. It's luck and the success stories you hear are entirely the lucky few
It's a real responsibility. The losses are real. I think the key thing is realizing that you don't find real fulfillment in doing what you want. You don't find it in financial success, or in travel.
And so you can wind up chasing more money or more travel or more time to do your thing, and never finding that it's enough to satisfy you, because what you're looking for isn't there. This trip won't be enough, and the next one won't either, because what you're hungry for isn't in a trip.
Children can help you learn that. If you have children and don't learn it, then you resent the children. "I didn't find what I was looking for, but I could have, if they didn't mess it up for me!"
But I'm not sure that I can explain this in a way that makes sense to someone who doesn't already kind of feel it...
Nah - I appreciated the comment and really agree with it. Life isn't just black and white, and simplifying it to that is reductionist to the weird minutia that makes up the brilliance of this whole experience.
Things just have been admittedly rocky for me through my life, and I'll fully own that too - it's what you do with your situation that matters. In some ways I'm stunted in comparison to lots of the folks here and have had to live my teens in my 20's, and a bit of my 20's into my 30's. I get that I'm a grown-ass-adult and all, but I'm still growing up, hence the "I'm not into this whole kids thing."
You literally have thousands of generations that have gone before you, that have sacrificed to give you those very choices you’ve outlined.
Your parents comforted you when you were scared, even to the detriment of their sleep. Fed you, clothed you, shared all of their resources even when they didn’t feel like it, even when it wasn’t to their advantage.
Edit: not sure why this is downvoted?
“Selfish: lacking consideration for others; concerned chiefly with one's own personal profit or pleasure.”
Your comments are not being downvoted because they are false - there is some truth in what you say.
They're being downvoted because:
(1) your comment is a blanket assumption on an entire group of people, and
(2) you claim a position of (likely unearned) moral superiority that (you assume) allows you to make such judgements on others.
Thus, you come off as "un-cool." Be cool, my friend. Don't judge strangers for the important life choices they make. You don't know enough about others' lives to make justifiable judgements on the important life choices they make.
>thousands of generations that have gone before you
(a) This is true. You would not be here if prior generations didn't sacrifice to have children.
>Fed you, clothed you, shared all of their resources even when they didn’t feel like it, even when it wasn’t to their advantage
(b) This is true. You would not exist if someone did not take care of you.
(c) The OP stated in this public forum, "We're just taking our time trying to do the right thing for us really... I just wish people would stop calling us selfish for that"
Since when is the concern for a child (born or not) with strong aspirations for financial/emotional self-care and responsibility "selfish"?
I am not comfortable having a child, therefore I am not having a child. I am not going to impose an unwanted child on this world as I know what it feels like to be one...
What about someone who has no kids, but instead cares for and commits their entire existence to helping humanity? Still selfish? What about the couple who has 10 kids and relies on charity and public assistance to survive? Not selfish?
Agree. And in this situation I would define any potential child as part of the "others" as in "it's selfish for me to have a kid if I'm not prepared financially/emotionally."
You know what future events I'm taking into consideration? Devastating climate change and what seems to be the decline of society more generally. I have real concerns about choosing to bring a child into a world that I feel so pessimistic about. That strikes me as thoughtful, not selfish. Though I have many selfish reasons for wanting to not have children, just as everyone who wants children has just as many selfish reasons themselves. I view neither of those things as "bad".
Moreover, if I'm going to start considering the impact I have on future generations and people by procreating, where does it stop? Should we have 10 children? Does my duty stop at two when we're replacing ourselves?
And given my level of commitment to local and national causes (financial and volunteer hours), does that offset ostensible selfishness of not having children? I'm passionate about helping this world despite having concerns about bringing anyone new into it.
I congratulate you for convincing yourself that your desire to do the thing you really want to do - have children - is any less selfish than the decisions I've also chosen. I sincerely believe you've missed the point, and I wish you ill-luck on your moral crusade.
It's important to keep in mind that all those generations before us did it because that's just what you did - by not reproducing you're not stopping the Kwisatz Haderach from being born or anything. There's no manifest destiny here - it's just that sex feels good. That's it.
> Your parents comforted you when you were scared, even to the detriment of their sleep. Fed you, clothed you, shared all of their resources even when they didn’t feel like it, even when it wasn’t to their advantage.
Oof, I’m glad you haven’t met some of the parents I’ve met.
This scene is directly responsible for convincing me to reproduce. I saw this movie, and less than a week later met some old dumb guy that said he had over 90 grandchildren. I was convinced I needed to do my part to shift the balance of the future toward intelligence.
I now have 3 children, and would love to have many many more.
You could make the argument those having kids are selfish. I'm not going to enumerate all the reasons why but it doesn't take much thought to come up with many.
I'm not saying they are selfish, only that people can make the argument either way. Ignore them.
> Also, with religious stresses being almost non-existent in the groups I run in I feel like people aren't jumping into legally-binding marriages
I’ve made the same observation, I think “common law” marriage is becoming a big thing. I also notice it’s not a mutually-appreciated situation for many couples long term, usually with one partner wanting to enter into a legal marriage but not the other for various reasons.
Both - even in this thread someone is getting downvoted into oblivion for calling me selfish:
> It's terrifying to me that selfishness and self-centeredness has apparently taken over that generation of young people.
It's a very common sentiment and it's usually older family/coworkers.
EDIT: now there's even more and weird "you're gonna die alone" comments in there too (which are common as a counter argument for waiting)... just look at this thread and you'll see exactly what I was trying to describe.
It is interesting to me that people who definitely want to have children think somehow they are being less selfish than those of us who don't. We're both doing what we want to do to bring and sustain joy in our lives.
Are these individuals the people that actually didn't want to have children but did so out of selfless commitment to their spouses or desire of their parents to become grandparents? I don't typically get that sense.
Relatedly: I feel very, very pessimistic about how our society is changing, and even worse about the environment. This is a large part of my reluctance to have children. Is that selfish too?
They are/were either in happy marriages with children and think everyone should experience that in the same way Timothy Leary thought everyone should drop acid and are both wrong, or they are/were in unhappy marriages or had horrible children and feel everyone should experience that in the same way fraternities think everyone should be hazed and are both wrong. Either way, they assume that you can either find the right spouse or give up your entire life just to have some kids that may or may not care about you on your deathbed. Nowhere in this discussion is the desire of the people who haven't yet had children considered. All arguments are in a bad faith authoritarian controlling nature: "I know better than you" type. Pretty much every argument on here that advocates for children falls into those two camps. Some people even write "when you have kids," assuming it's inevitable because they are simply too closed minded and blind to the fact that not everyone wants kids.
Finally, whatever reason you have for wanting or not wanting kids is always going to be selfish first. It might also contain altruistic elements. There's nothing wrong with being selfish and doing what is best for you. Or are we all supposed to be altruistic and donate our entire salary every month to charity? Absurd.
I believe people who do not want to have children and yet plan to depend on the social safety or their own savings are either being selfish or being ignorant about how these programs work. It is not sufficient to just pay your taxes, because they go to fund the current beneficiaries. When it is your turn to use these programs, you will need a new set of people to pay taxes to fund your retirement / maintain stock market valuation of your portfolio by working in those companies / produce food or entertainment or service which you are going to consume. These people need to be born and raised, either in your society or in other societies. And no, robots are not coming anytime soon to take care of your finances and consumption in your retirement.
I will acknowledge that this is the best community-minded argument for having children that I've seen, but it also has the distinction of being the least convincing on influencing personal decisions. You may as well be selling me on a Ponzi scheme. Your argument presents raising children as if you're farming a resource to ensure our half-asses social safety net doesn't collapse.
This point is not lost on me, but it does lose some power when I'm working for actual systemic change that doesn't create such a stratified, ponzi-scheme style social structure. I'm not going to be a human resources bot to keep the SS fund liquid (which is a far larger problem than just me), but I'm also not just sitting around watching the world crumble without taking action.
I'm sure we can yadda yadda yadda our way into the inevitable debate about the parallels, perils and pitfalls of a society built on unending economic growth, but let's not. A broken system creates an obligation to fix the system, not keep it on life support with my sex organs.
Thanks for your insight that this is not going to change anyone's minds. And frankly, "being selfish" has lost a lot of its stigma, so planning to enjoy one's retirement while relying on the labor of the future generations raised by someone else can be a totally acceptable plan in many parts of our society.
Question to you - if you think current system is broken, what would you replace it with if you had all the power?
A couple separate issues but first and foremost I'm sorry you are being treated this way.
1. HNers (myself included) are argumentative and treat HN like a debate platform. I wouldn't assign any weight to comments here about issues such as this (or anything for that matter)
2. The people in your real world sound pretty terrible. I can't think of one person who would DARE tell me I'm being selfish for choosing to have kids or not. Maybe it's because I'm a man, or self-confident, or something else but I couldn't even imagine someone saying this to me without it turning into a very unpleasant argument, not to mention me cutting off contact.
Did I just luck out with family, peers and coworkers? Maybe.
I've cut off contact with a huge chunk of my family and my GF's family is way more understanding as they've been living in California for the last 20 years and get that people just have different ways of living for different reasons. They've made marriage comments but they just want us to get hitched since we've been together for so long which I see as way more benign than pushing us for kids.
I find it's predominantly a conservative view that comes from religious underpinnings. I also think it comes down to a lot of folks who took the traditional path because "that's what you're suppose to do" who are threatened by alternative life circumstances.
I respond with, "we're taking our time to figure things out financially and emotionally to be healthy people" - or something along those lines. It's a 100% genuine answer and usually knocks them off their stance enough that they consider how things may be for someone different than them.
I could get into more details but a big reason I deal with this is because I'm the very socially liberal black-sheep that moved to California in my conservative Iowan family. It's just a way for them to dig at me passive-aggressively without outright challenging my views. I've also experienced this in workplaces/offices with uncomfortably strong Christian vibes.
I have no knowledge of your specific situation but one thing to remember if in your case its your parents pushing you to have kids is that they may be doing it out of both the desire to have grand kids and see the continuation of their line as well as them knowing that they love you and want you to experience that same love. With that said, don't let anyone pressure you into making what is probably the largest single decision in anyone's life.
> Anecdotal: Many folks in my social circles are just less willing to accept the real responsibility of raising a child. We're all late-20-somethings/early 30-somethings and I have the conversation all the time with people who want to wait until things like careers are established, until they have a chance to seriously travel a bit, and most commonly they just want to enjoy a relationship without the stress of kids. Kids are an insanely huge responsibility, and to parent right all of your life priorities change completely.
I don't meet these people often (I'll be 30/dead in a few months). Most of the people I meet are just not interested in kids - or they already have them. The bank of mom & dad helps with that down payment so they can start pumping out children. I've had friends who gave up on children - they were satisfied being the cool aunt and uncle. I imagine the financial pressure has some influence like it does for me.
Personally - I'm at such a financial burden that I don't know when it'll happen. I quite literally cannot imagine having kids or being excited about them because I find it so hard to even get further in my career with financial prospects. Children is a complete non-starter if I don't have the income to support them. And I don't want them to ever live anything close to what I grew up with - the generational poverty line stops with me. It's not like I have a partner who could have kids right now anyway. (My significant other is about to be gone for ~2 years to finish her degree)
I can't imagine having kids when I hate my jobs so much (agonizing) and feel like I get paid peanuts (half or less than what my peers make at bigger places). So - I'll wait. No sense in having kids when I'm miserable AF because I can't get what I want or need to support them. Maybe they'll never happen. Maybe my significant other will find a new partner who has rich parents. Maybe I'll be single forever more. Whatever.
"Don't wait for the perfect moment, take the moment and make it perfect"
While there is definitely bad timing when it comes to kids, there is never a perfect time. I waited because I didn't really care but now I wish I hadn't. Every year you wait is one less year you get to know them. They are selfish little jerks that could change the way you think and give you a renewed purpose. As long as you can provide food, shelter, love and imagination you don't need anything else and neither will they.
Maybe now really is a bad time for you though as it's hard to know without stepping in your shoes. But if you really want them, I genuinely hope you find that just-perfect-enough moment.
There will always be people out there saying there is no perfect time to have children. And, thus, their conclusion is that because there's no perfect time then there is no time that makes one time better than another.
I can tell you quite confidently that having children now would ruin us financially and emotionally. In 2 years after my partner graduates college, in all likelihood, it'd do the same. My wife would never be able to get a job because she'd be a college grad that went right into childbearing without ever having a professional job. Some five to seven years later when she is forced to go back into the workforce - she'd never be able to get anything that would substantially contribute to our income.
So - really - when is a good time for me? I don't know - I don't think it ever existed for me. I'm left with not good and terrible times. All I've learned from my friends who did have kids was to have kids earlier than 37. So far, it's lookin' like 37 is what will be the age for me because I won't have my career, my wife's career, or my financial situation worked out until then. Fortunately, for one of us, my significant other (if we're still together) will only be 30.
Such is life. Full of ruined plans because I tried to break into the upper class while being born into a much much lower one.
On a global level, a wealthy person delaying or not having kids is an altruistic gift, avoiding pollution.
On a family level, not having kids (ever) is both selfish (if you neither pay back your parents for their effort not pay it forward it to kids of your own) and also vandalism to your parents: genetic heritage.
I didn't ask to be born, it was forced on me. I don't see why I would have any moral obligation to not vandalize my genetic heritage nor why I would owe anyone taking the responsibility of another life.
19 years ago I built a several TB data warehouse that searched and returned data in a matter of seconds. 10 years ago I built a system that linked several TB of data together and returned data in a matter of milliseconds. Today I work for a company that sifts through hundreds of TB of data, PB of indexes, and GB of associated data that returns in a matter of milliseconds.
What I’m saying is if that data warehouse is not a core business operation there is no reason to throw any more resources at it than is necessary. Dystopian nightmares can be enabled by simply adding new indexes or adding more compute nodes.
Thanks for your reply. I saw most of the replies in that thread were 8-9hrs old so I thought it wasn't the right place to ask. I really appreciate your reply and it sounds like my worries aren't unfounded.
Other people sacrificed a lot so you could enjoy this thing called life. I think that saddles you with a burden of paying the debt forward to your children. After all, you’re the only person who can bestow the gift of life on them.
I think many people agree with you, maybe even just on a subconscious level. But I’m not sure that it’s a good argument. Doesn’t that logic imply that you have a duty to bestow life on as many children as possible? It’s not just your first and second child that are owed the gift of life that only you can bestow. It’s also the 14th and 15th and so on, right?
If you sacrifice your entire life to have children, that would be very admirable, but then you wouldn’t have any life left to enjoy yourself. At that point, you’re no longer merely paying things forward. So no, I don’t think my logic implies that you have to have as many children as possible.
In my opinion, the magic number is 2. When you have two children, you are keeping the number of humans alive constant (since it takes two people to have a child, you only get “credit” for half of each child). Everything beyond that is purely up to you to balance the sacred work of creating human lives vs. enjoying your own pursuits.
I think part of the error in this train of thought is thinking having kids is a huge responsibility. Naturally speaking, its the most straightforward thing. We've made it into a huge responsibility.
I probably wouldn’t call it an error and say “having kids needs to be” rather than “having kids is”.
It’s reasonable to speak inside the inside the big walls society puts up without specifying so.
Unless you’re willing to go to the extreme of somehow going off the grid and home schooling (and god forbid you have health care issues, for example), it’s just the way it is.
I am making this comment here as a late father of two in good faith.
Please consider at least 1/3 of what I am trying to say.
"Many folks in my social circles are just less willing to accept the real responsibility of raising a child. We're all late-20-somethings/early 30-somethings and I have the conversation all the time with people who want to wait until things like careers are established,"
This is the eternal search for the "perfect time", "perfect conditions" as I sometimes said myself:
"When I have more time, I will go to the Gym."
"When I get more money I will be able to save."
"All-in-all I've noticed a big generational gap in thinking on this one because all I hear from tons of older relatives is "sooo when you guys getting married?" ...or even pushing for children before the fact. It feels unnatural and downright weird to field those questions and it's neigh impossible to explain we're just taking our time to enjoy this thing and not rushing into huge commitments with marriage or kids..."
No, there is not. I am in my forties and got the same questions.
But you know what the real deal is?
People are not asking about the children. They are polite, trying to alert you.
Life is a match competition game if you are aware or not.
Older ladies compete against younger ladies (more fertile)
Man compete with another man for physical security (muscles and tall) or financial security(money, resources).
The main problem is sometimes you are having fun with someone that you can't see yourself having a family.
Now about the other reasons to not have a baby:
1. The "earth", carbon resources, global warming -> Riiight it seems the propaganda only targets one part of the population that is not the part of the problem.
2. We just need more robots: That will be nice for you to live in a robotic nursery home. "Alexa! Give me my pills".
3. Immigration will complement: different people, different traditions, different morals. Don't get surprised later!
Now consider at least 1/3 of what I said in good faith:
1. Are you spending your time with someone you can see raising a family? If not is like sleeping with a poisonous snake in your bedroom. One day it will bite you.
2. Did your past jobs/companies called you on holidays? Invited you for a BBQ?
3. Who profits from high IQ, working hard people not having kids? Have you checked how much a burrito breakfast is charged in a retirement home? How much is "dinner"? (microwave)
Please consider it in good faith. What if 1/3 is true?
Why would I gamble on 1/3 odds? Does that make you 2/3rds likely to be wrong?
There's a whole movement now of people coming out and saying that they don't like having kids - as a society we made that impossible to say without severe chastisement. We have no idea if the women in your life who regret it now would be happy with children. It's all a gamble, and tell people that their time is running out isn't particularly helpful, and running entirely on guilt.
All right, though your manner of writing is extremely hard to parse, lets look at the arguments:
I don't know what you're saying here. Try more? For something I don't want?
Later on:
1. Are you spending your time with someone you can see raising a family? If not is like sleeping with a poisonous snake in your bedroom. One day it will bite you.
Yes, but neither she nor I want one.
2. Did your past jobs/companies called you on holidays? Invited you for a BBQ?
The company has a BBQ, yes. So... I guess that's covered?
3. Who profits from high IQ, working hard people not having kids? Have you checked how much a burrito breakfast is charged in a retirement home? How much is "dinner"? (microwave)
Is it my duty to take care of my parents? That's another selfish argument. Also, it's a bit conceited to assume high IQ.
"There's a whole movement now of people coming out and saying that they don't like having kids - as a society, we made that impossible to say without severe chastisement. We have no idea if the women in your life who regret it now would be happy with children. It's all a gamble, and tell people that their time is running out isn't particularly helpful, and running entirely on guilt."
Their time is running out.
In a natural average progression, people have a peak in healthiness, and then decline starts as age progress.
Whatever you hold as "fair" does not matter.
Mother Nature has a different plan. We can buy sometimes not all time.
"Are non-optimal babies undesirable?"
We as a society have whole care with conception, prenatal care, prenatal screening, and checks.
That shows how we care about it.
That is a signal that yes society as a whole wants healthy babies.
... .... ...
The path of having babies is NOT for all.
Society had a place without children for positions as mentors, charity, and educators.
If you are OK and it seems you are happy with your option that is great.
You remember me of my "wise uncle" that has a lot of stories and wisdom to teach us.
And his role was to mentor and give a different perspective.
When we got angry with parents or don't know what to do and need advice without the parent's bias he was our mentor.
But my point is:
1. Time is a factor;
2. No, you don't have all the time;
The message my friends and me got and BELIEVED was:
"you can do it all!"
"After your Ph.D. you can marry"
"Once you get your assistant professor position you can start".
"Better finish your Ph.D., buy a house and then get a raise to have kids".
"After you finish with your startup then we have kids".
people should have kids, I think the "no kids" thing is really just a modern American concept. It's fine to wait and plan but I feel sorry for people who say they don't want kids because of what they are reading in global news or whatever. humans have raised children through far worse conditions than now!
Stressful only if you make it. Tiring for everyone, but that's different. Even if you go broke and end up living in a trailer in the sticks it's still ok to have had kids and they will be ok.
For two months, lockdown protesters have been called selfish for the perception that they stand in opposition to what their detractors believe is a more important obligation to wider society over their personal concerns.
By the same token, having children is essential to maintain the social welfare state, and those that choose to travel or maintain a career instead are currently benefiting from that state while not contributing future workers back to it.
I don't know what the solution is, but short of dismantling the welfare state, there needs to be a concern on the part of today's young people for the perpetuation of the system from which they benefited so greatly.
Given current events, the argument could be made that it'll also throw you overboard the minute it hits turbulent times as well. Rough seas ahead, somebody is going in the water.
Right now I feel for the folks that physically have to be on the front-line of all of this to the point I'll say we did throw a lot of them overboard.
I'm afraid someone will go off on me for saying this, in regards to unemployment - I do not believe many of these jobs are ever coming back... and I think we've got a recession on our hands that's about to make 2008 look like a stroll through the tulips. We're just in the quiet before the storm =(
I don't think enough people here get how lucky most HNers are to be on the right side of the class divide, especially now.
Given that this recession was largely artificial - in the sense it's not the market pausing itself, I have no idea if this will prove to be a bad one or not - I don't think we've ever seen anything like this before. But I do share the same fear you have, that the jobs aren't coming back. I think for a lot of companies the skeleton crew will become the normal crew, and as always more will be done with less to the detriment of everyone who isn't still employed.
> It also seems like the system that will throw me overboard ... the moment I hit turbulent times.
Which is why having a set of people who are close to you is so priceless. Ultimately, your family and your best friends are more likely to be there for you than any government run program.
> having children is essential to maintain the social welfare state
That's not actually true though - immigration happily supports the required population growth. When the whole world stops reproducing we may need a plan B, but that's not a problem right now.
To a large extent immigration (along with internal migration) and the pressure it puts on real estate costs have been responsible for the drop in birth rates. I know plenty of people that would have had kids if they'd had the financial stability and didn't require both parent working full time. But the current generation id far poorer than their parents where it counts.
> When the whole world stops reproducing we may need a plan B, but that's not a problem right now.
Regardless of reproduction rates this will happen sooner than you think. As India and China become more developed emigrating becomes less and less desirable as the gap between risk and reward shrinks. After that there is no pool of immigrants with a similar size, sub-saharan Africa will likely become one but the educational standard of that population will likely rise in a much more staggered fashion, it will never match the numbers we saw from India and China.
You don't think the same socioeconomic forces will come into play on other developing nations as they follow the same sort of progression as China and India? Are you arguing that Africa is just inherently less intelligent?
Immigration also requires someone having children, just in a different country. And the birth rate is already declining across the world [1]. So it is still kind of selfish, at a country level, to not have kids of your own but let the other countries go through the trouble of having and raising kids only to lure them once they are ready to contribute to the society.
It's terrifying to me that selfishness and self-centeredness has apparently taken over that generation of young people. Our society and culture are doomed if this doesn't change.
Try not to discount the external pressure the current generation faces.
Real wage declines, often dual incomes required just to keep up, two major recessions during prime career building years, primary equity channels increasingly unaffordable, cultural mal-adaptation in many semi-rural/small metro areas to support children in dual-income situations, poor financial literacy as a part of core education, punitive judicial system engendering classism, and more. Not all these problems are new. However, they have increased and are the daily reality this generation faces.
Want to see more people have children? Encourage, vote for, and adopt policies that reduce the external costs of child rearing and birthing. Only then, if low birth rate remains extant, can doomsaying and despair over cultural selfishness be acceptable. Until then, focus on bug-fixing the social platform.
That's one way to look at it. The more realistic is, I think, to recognize that the generation reaching child-bearing age has lived through one major recession, seemingly another is on the way and our response to the first was to increase the indebtedness of everyone broadly. Even past that, with Millenials and lower you're looking at people that take the possibility of catastrophic climate change seriously and have serious anxiety about it. Is it responsible to bring a child into the world if you're broke and if you're dreading the future?
OP seems like they run in some affluent circles, but the problem is broader than just among the affluent.
I have a weird situation with one foot in affluent California, and one foot in blue collar Iowa (Cedar Rapids). It's all over in my experience.
Also, I have definitely thought about all of those things you've listed in regards to life planning, and would say that they definitely influence me strongly on this.
> I have a weird situation with one foot in affluent California, and one foot in blue collar Iowa (Cedar Rapids). It's all over in my experience.
I wonder how weird that is. My situation is broadly similar, excepting that I'm from Missouri. For what it's worth, I wasn't aiming to call you out as being well-off and out of touch. I was responding more to the bits I thought the intermediate poster was perceiving as selfish and what not.
> Also, I have definitely thought about all of those things you've listed in regards to life planning, and would say that they definitely influence me strongly on this.
On the contrary; I think it's rather selfless to pay for infrastructure and programs that help raise kids, when you have none yourself.
The real narcissism to me, is bringing a child into this world when you're not 100% certain in your abilities to properly raise it. It is a lifetime commitment you need to know you're ready to make before you do so.
Choosing not to have kids doesn't mean you're selfish or self-centered. In fact, it's often the complete opposite. Choosing to have kids when you're not in a situation to raise them decently (mentally, physically, emotionally, financially) is the more selfish choice.
Well its a reflection of the world previous generations have built to us - you have to study very hard, work hard, in US take massive loans even before entering workforce, no way a single parent can feed whole family like it used to before and so on...
People want more enjoyment out of life, and in the same time finding their place in life got harder. Have state support parentship more (ie sponsored kindergardens instead of horribly expensive ones), because modern folks often live too far from their parents. And tons of other supportive things.
Ie in Switzerland where I live, you are taxed more if you as a couple get married. Staying single brings more than 1000$ extra per month. Even with 1 kid, we are still worse off compared to not marrying. I mean, how more clear can the state be to giving you a massive fuck you as a parent? People here have kids despite state child support policies, not thanks to them.
If you don't feel that you have some support, kids are simply too hard for many. Although, subjectively, they are the best thing in my life.
Could someone explain this viewpoint to me? It's a common one but I just don't understand where it's coming from. What am I depriving anyone by not having children? I could make the argument that having children is selfish but I don't really understand the opposite perspective well.
This is the viewpoint you adopt when you believe in natalist politics but blame individuals rather than the material conditions they must cope with.
Natalism comes from a few different sources. Some of them are religious in nature ("God commands us to be fruitful and multiply."). Sometimes it comes from an econometric analysis ("We need more workers to be economically competitive."). Sometimes it comes from a humanistic desire to see people happy with kids. Usually though, it's not that last reason that people start talking about "selfishness". The most relatable and forgiving reason someone might act like this is that they want grandkids and are salty about it.
Who is OP being selfish towards? The children they don't have? If that's the case then is its selfish to stop having kids is it not? Have 2 kids, its selfish not to have 7. Who decides the correct amount of children to have and who decides if that number is greater than 0?
There are a variety of factors that are or should be taken into account before having a child, OP is being responsible. If they don't want or feel like they are not ready for a child, not having a child is the responsible option.
This 'generation of young people' are incredibly financially insecure and are currently experiencing the second great recession of their lives. Adding the expense of children to that is not a responsible action. Good for OP for making a rational decision that suits their needs.
In my extended family and high school network, nearly everyone in my age group who had a kid in their early 20s has been on welfare or other assistance at some point. The financial stress ruined a lot of those marriages. And it doesn’t scale, since someone’s taxes paid for all that support.
Waiting a few extra years for financial security is not selfish. Having children without building up some assets to ride through a financial crisis or bout of unemployment is selfish.
> It's terrifying to me that selfishness and self-centeredness has apparently taken over that generation of young people.
It's selfish and self-centered to not* have children?
> Our society and culture are doomed if this doesn't change.
That's one opinion I guess. Personally I believe our society and culture are doomed if we don't significantly decrease the human population. But that's just another opinion.
*Edit: I forgot the "not" which obviously entirely changes the meaning of my post.
Having kids in the first world is probably the most selfish act one can do. All other obvious arguments aside (w.r.t. impact on society, the planet, etc. compared to the alternatives), if your motivation was not basically selfish you'd adopt.
It's literally the same thing, except you don't get to propagate your genes and might get less of a personal hormone rush.
There are young people all over the world who would go to the US right now, if they could get a visa, because they will have better opportunities there, and because they genuinely love the US culture.
The only culture that is liable to die from lack of children is a culture that could not survive in the free.
Depends on the reasons. I cannot have children because of a genetic disorder that my father decided to spread around irresponsibly, having lots of kids with multiple women. That disorder took the life of my brother recently, and I was explicitly advised to NOT have children because it apparently becomes worse every generation, something proven by the children of my stepbrothers and sisters.
Try to explain that to people, and you might as well be telling them that the weather is bad, though. It's kinda nonsensical.
It is easily arguable that given the overpopulation of the planet and looming risks of climate change that the people delaying or choosing against having kids are saving the future for humanity.
Isn't the act of having children just as selfish--or more selfish? I don't know of any parents (I have four children) who had kids to advance the human race. Most of the reasons for having kids--that I have heard--are related to the personal satisfaction of raising children, having a family, and not being alone when old. Not having kids is less selfish than having kids, as the non-parent is not adding any additional stress to society or the environment.
Absolutely - and I'll make the argument that by rushing into something that I'm not ready for financially/emotionally that I would be doing the kid and world a huge disservice.
> It is always funny how people without kids tell you how life is with kids...and try to teach the world about it...
In my experience I mainly hear about those who've had kids telling people about how life is without kids. Of course they've all been in that position before they had kids, but they certainly have no experience of a lifetime without children.
People always seem to believe their wisdom is much greater than the sum of their experience.
Being terrified that if I have a child I'm going to subject myself and it to financial ruin? I still feel like I'm barely surviving. Because I graduated when the 08 recession happened it necessitated a life course correction, and took me until my 30's until I got my career started. Having lived my twenties paycheck to paycheck, I'm just starting to realize I have money in the bank and the next thousand dollar expense isn't going to empty me out. I can't imagine retiring, nor ever really feeling good about where I am in life. When does the hedonism start?
It is pretty amazing that we are witnessing hard natural selection in action. Think of it like a disease that kills 50% of population. Those that have immunity get to pass their genes, rest die out. Sort of like pressure from smallpox.
I am really curious how this will get resolved. Just collapse of current society with the values we have, some selection of properties like “need” to have kids imprinted even harder then it is now?
Humans 100 years from now will be quite different to us it seems.
I am also quite amazed at all the kids hate. In addition to all other awesome things they allow you to relive your childhood, chance to have an incredibly close friend, you can teach them what you know, do some incredible things together. Etc. Kids are not expensive unless you make them so. They can help you with stuff too you know..(that is if you raise them to be decent people and not just spend days staring at the iPad so they don’t bother you)
The most expensive part of a kid is stretching yourself to your limits to get them into the most expensive neighborhoods (I.e. best schools) possible.
And the unfortunate thing is the data shows that this is the best move for people to make, as the peers you are surrounded are the biggest determinant of your future success (see opportunity atlas). Which is why people stretch themselves to the max with 30 year mortgages. It’s inevitable in a society with ever widening wealth/income gaps.
If you are putting off having a child on account of money you are doing life wrong. Plenty of large families have non-software incomes and do just fine. They may not be able to eat out but it's a sacrifice worth making.
> If you are putting off having a child on account of money you are doing life wrong. Plenty of large families have non-software incomes and do just fine. They may not be able to eat out but it's a sacrifice worth making.
This varies a lot on where you live and the income. Not everyone in software is making $400k+/yr in the bay area.
Plenty of large families continue a streak of poverty for generations. Poverty and trauma are very generational. If you don't want to continue that streak then you need to get yourself out first.
I think most people would agree that having children while homeless is a bad idea. Where that line is is a personal choice. I wouldn’t want kids unless I could reasonably guarantee they’d be in a decent school district with some chance to move up the socioeconomic ladder. But thats just my opinion.
> Birthrates fell or held steady for women of all ages except those in their early 40s. Teenagers saw the sharpest drop, with a 5% decline in their birthrate. Since peaking in 1991, the teen birthrate has fallen 73%.
Seems to me like people are waiting longer these days. We may be in a lull at the moment, but I'd expect this to pick back up barring any adverse economic conditions.
If you push out the whole distribution of child births, some of those would-be child births will not happen. Female fertility falls rapidly after 35[1]. It's not something you can simply delay across the population and expect to get the same total reproduction rate. People will have fewer kids than they otherwise would have.
Plus access to contraceptives, sexual education, and economic and social considerations -- lot of factors that could contribute to the drop in <24 year old group.
The US more or less hates kids and parents. You want more kids? Our society needs to reduce health care and childcare costs while socially making the "village" more of a socially accepted setup. I have 3 generations in my house with other family nearby. I can't imagine doing it any other way. The current job environment is you should be moving to where the jobs are. Why do people need to move to sit on a computer all day is beyond me.
exactly. I left the US, and there are just way more young couples with kids here. People generally live near their family and have support and won't drop everything chasing jobs thousands of miles away. During lockdown we're staying with my in-laws w/ our 12 onth old, and don't know how this will not continue especially with two kids. Restaurants, long haul travel, bingeing TV, all that stuff are just superficial luxuries of modern life and not the norm and highly overrated IMO. It's time to return to a simpler life. Focus on family, free outdoor activities, vacations are simple road trips to nearby locations, camping and so on.
yep. agreed here. i would be more likely to want/have kids if i actually lived in a place that was built for kids (tons of space, nature, and a house). instead i'm stuck in the city with jobs that need your ass in a chair and the stress of subway commutes, tons of people, noise, no space. no wonder nobody wants kids. cities simply suck for raising them.
Respectfully, I think reducing childcare costs is in direct tension with returning to an expectation that grandparents share some of the child rearing responsibilities.
Hopefully an expansion of remote work can improve this situation.
We had 8 years of happy marriage before having a kid, which resulted in decades of a different kind of happy marriage. I’m glad we waited and glad we became parents.
What’s not frequently discussed is how many people are unhappy having become parents. It worked out great for us but one thing I learnt was how many other parents regret that choice. There’s an understandable taboo on discussing it (you have the responsibility, and you don’t want the kids, who had no choice in the matter, to feel unwanted) but a result of the taboo is that people feel pressured into shifting their life in a way they regret.
One reason why I think it worked for us is because we waited.
The Ponzi scheme that is the economy is not going to work unless there are lots of new entrants. We either need a) lots of births or b) lots of immigration.
I don't know about other people, but the idea of trying to have a child is unfathomable to me because I am very, very far away from being (economically) in a place where I feel comfortable breeding. As someone who doesn't fit the mold society wants me to be (i.e., a real contrarian but not in the hip cool SV way), there's simply no way I can participate in the one thing that being human is really about: procreation.
PS[edit]: Idiocracy is a great film and everyone should watch it.
As a parent I personally think people are way too preoccupied with trying to have perfect material conditions before having a child. If you can put a roof over their head, feed, cloth, and love them and give them a mostly constant home environment you're doing your job as a parent. Kids are sensitive to their social conditions but oblivious to their material situation until they've entered preadolescence. This can be pulled off even in times of great economic insecurity (think about all the depression-era babies). It's arguably easier to get them out of way when you're younger, healthier and can withstand sleep deprivation better. Money won't buy you sleep unless you've got enough for a nanny.
> If you can put a roof over their head, feed, cloth, and love them and give them a mostly constant home environment you're doing your job as a parent
See - that's the thing. Lots of us can't commit to that because we're still securing the consistency of those resources for ourselves. All I'm saying is I don't agree with "I'm way too preoccupied" when I see the following grocery list as a very tall order for most people starting off today.
> Kids are sensitive to their social conditions but oblivious to their material situation until they've entered preadolescence.
As someone who grew up in a family with even mild struggles... yeah this just doesn't hold up. Lots of kids know as early as when they enter school. You notice the gaps between you and your peers almost immediately and often will have peers point it out to you because the poor kid is easy to pick on. You wear different clothes (second hand/etc), you probably struggle a bit with school, you don't have the cool video game system, you don't get to do the cool stuff other kids do... etc etc.
I too grew up in a poor household, and it may be part of the reason why I'm reluctant. I wouldn't want to put someone else through what I had to go through.
I grew up poor and on the scale of 'things that bothered me as a child' it doesn't even rate compared to my mom being abusive. If you're treated with love and respect by your family, having clothes with holes on them are a speedbump at worst.
> As a parent I personally think people are way too preoccupied with trying to have perfect material conditions before having a child.
I alluded to this in a different comment, but I think for most people the uncertainty is a bigger impediment than absolute conditions. If you had poor material conditions, but could at least count on them to remain stable no matter what, you could make that work as fair as raising a family. But the defining feature of the contemporary economy is that you'll never have that certainty: at any minute you might go from material security to being kicked out onto the street, and in the US at least you'll get no help except "Guess you shouldn't have had children lol; pull yourself up by your bootstraps loser."
> This can be pulled off even in times of great economic insecurity (think about all the depression-era babies).
I'm not sure what you mean by "all the depression-era babies". The Great Depression had the lowest birthrate the US had ever seen, and it did not pick up again until after the war: [0]
+1. It's never a "perfect" time to do huge things like getting married or having kids. There is always a risk of something going wrong. Waiting for that moment is never ending.
As the xkcd comic notes, we are, each of us, the tip of a long chain of people who lived in less than perfect material conditions and succeeded in raising a family anyway.
(Of course, the same comic also notes "They did it, therefore I'm here, therefore I can do it" is the mother of all confirmation biases ;) )
> there's simply no way I can participate in the one thing that being human is really about: procreation.
As someone with 2 kids and a third on the way, I think this is a really sad and reductive way to think about life. The way I think about the meaning and purpose of my life has changed since I had kids, but I had a perfectly meaningful and purposeful life before that. Focus more on finding meaning and making connections with other people, and less on your economic situation and whether you can afford to "breed". People who live in abject poverty can still have happy families, or live happy, meaningful lives.
Having a balanced age pyramid is not a Ponzi scheme: it's natural and healthy and as old as hunter-gatherer society itself. You want youthful energetic members, optimistic innovators and learners; middle-aged strong leaders, fighters, and innovators; and you want elder wise-people. There's actually a reason humans are long-lived past menopause: the old/grandparents provide a lot of value in social groups.
The one way I agree with Ponzi Scheme... in the USA currently, at least, there's been a massive transfer of wealth to Boomers from everyone else via SS, Medicare, pensions, and all the cheap education and services that have since evaporated. I doubt these conditions will exist for anyone else...Boomers really got an amazing deal.
-As people grow old, they are economically dependent upon people younger than them.
-A growing population goes hand-in-hand with a growing economy. This tends to bring prosperity to many people.
And as a bit of a tangent: The argument that a shrinking population is good for the planet and is therefore better than a growing population feels to me like an extremely pessimistic argument, and the people that I personally know that embrace it have a much less human-centric moral intuition than I do. I put a lot lot lot more worth on human happiness than that of animals, and to me it seems that a cultural disconnect from the natural act of procreation implies an unhappiness that is rooted in how cultures are run nowadays.
Why does a growing economy require a growing population? There's not a very strong correlation between population and GDP per capita - the US has the highest GDP and there's several countries with significantly larger populations.
As automation comes online, the amount of wealth generated per unit of human labor goes up.
A growing economy requires, in the large, an increasing labor pool, but that labor can be human or machine-amplified human. If the amplification rate is growing fast enough, we can grow the economy with a shrinking headcount.
(The other side of the equation---consumption---also balances out; people with more leisure time consume more).
The economy doesn’t and just about every argument that says it does shows very clearly the bias of those who make them.
That said, there are many things social structures and institutions with embedded growth assumptions such as social security, pension plans, government debt, etc.
You need human beings to actually produce stuff and grow the economy, which drives most public and private retirement accounts (we're not just talking about social security here).
> but why do you need an increasing number of them?
Because most public and private retirement accounts assumed that the growth would occur, thus it was okay to promise themselves a pension and health package that was very, very generous based on lots of younger people paying X%.
They literally are pyramid schemas which require a larger group of workers to support. In other words, they calculated something like 'When I'm 63, there will be 4 workers available for each retiree, and each worker can afford to pay $15K a year in taxes to support that $60K / year pension.'
Well, it turns out there are only 3 workers for each retiree. So either the workers need to be taxed $20K each to support this pensioner, or the pensioner has to take a 25% cut.
The American Dream is that all families climb the ladder to the point where they own a house that always goes up in value and a stock market portfolio basically guaranteed by federal economic policy to grow 10% a year over the long term.
All those people earning money by doing nothing needs to be supported by an ever-increasing influx of people actually doing work. So we promise the latter the American Dream. Ponzi scheme.
Not “everyone”. Imagine the economy like a tank of water, and each person a single molecule of H20, and proximity to the top of the tank represents relative wealth. So all the water molecules are constantly shifting a bit, but mostly stay in place unless something shakes up the tank.
If you sprinkle water on the top, those molecules stay mostly at the top: rich parents’ kids mostly stay rich. If you feed water in through a pump at the bottom, most of those molecules will stay at the bottom: poor parents’ kids usually stay poor.
In general, the closer you are to the top or bottom, the more likely you are to stay there. Adding from the bottom pushes the people at the top even higher, yes; but those in between the bottom and top mostly just shift around as the middle gets wider.
It's more like a pyramid, where the people at the top of the pyramid go farther up the more people you add to the bottom. The size of the whole pyramid increases over time, and some people might move up or down a few levels, but the majority of people will spend their whole lives near the bottom.
Most per-capita growth is just inflation. Additionally, metrics like CPI don't include inflation of assets like real estate, even though the utility of a home doesn't change over time without some kind of upgrades. Real estate in particular is inflated largely because of the ease of acquiring leverage.
I decided against kids a couple of years ago and I’m so glad I did. I just couldn’t see myself raising kids the way I wanted to and being able to keep my career and quality of life. And I see so many new parents just being ground down by it all, and that was before the pandemic.
Without independent wealth, I just don’t see how people do it without making some incredible sacrifices.
They DO make incredible sacrifices: losing sleep, losing free time, everything gets messy and slobbery, kids are very expensive, they can get into trouble and worry you...on and on.
Then again, parents see the trade-offs. They'll have someone to take care of them later, to pay some of that forward to society, plus parents are often the kind of people who love babies/kids and take joy and pleasure in the process.
It totally makes the best sense to let every person decide if these trade-offs are worth it...but I do think we should support parents financially, as having a balanced age pyramid is an important thing for a society.
This is probably the most longterm bet any human makes, but it's also very dependent on culture. Sheltering with and caring for your elders is common in countries like Japan and India, whereas in the U.S. it usually amounts to depositing them at a nice nursing home.
Maybe not now, but the generation coming of age now seems very different from the generation aging out. I think we could be in for an even wilder ride, politically, in the coming decades.
Until I had kids I would probably agree with you, but now that I do having my career be slightly less successful doesn't seem like much of a sacrifice at all. Careerism seems like such an empty modern day religion to me compared to the joy of raising my children.
I know this is a sci-fi scenario, but: don't overpopulation problems evaporate once space travel and colonization really kick off? In fact, at that point, it would seem that more people = better, at least if 'explore the universe' is something you think civilization should do.
This scenario seems doable/likely within a few hundred years. Less if space travel becomes more than a niche thing.
Space travel and colonization is so far off from a realistic option that you might as well be talking about Captain Marvel swooping in and saving the planet. The physics simply don’t allow it to happen (short of some truly major breakthrough like warp drive/time travel). And we don’t have hundreds or thousands of years to wait for things like that — the current trends point to a few decades at best to solve these problems.
Also, colonization creates more people. The current ones stay where they are, while only a few adventurers move to the new place, and then have kids there. Most people are not going to give up a lifetime’s worth of building a life somewhere, at least not in the numbers needed to impact total population.
I don't know, that seems a bit pessimistic. Right now, space travel is a tiny fraction of global economic activity. What if that increased 10x, 100x, or 1,000x?
Submarines and self-contained vessels might be a good metaphor/approach, as compared to a full-blown colony. It doesn't seem implausible that we could have millions of self-contained spaceships, each carrying hundreds of people, within ~200 years, assuming that serious percentages of GDP are put toward it.
We could, but hundreds of millions is a small fraction of our population and 200 years is too long if it’s an important part of the solution.
Also, cislunar space is much easier than colonising the planets, which is in turn orders of magnitude easier than colonising other star systems — even if you can find enough people to do it, which is hard because why would Joe or Jane Average want to go to a deep space colony where ping-time is measured in years at best, or dozens of geological epochs at worst?
Space is big. Really big. It’s such a long way to the nearest star to Sol that I expect a billion people living in a floating Pacific seastead community before I the first hundred thousand reach the stars.
Unfortunately, once we do have proper cheap space access with e.g. a launch loop, the exponential nature of growth means it only takes 50 generations of 4-child families to go up each step along the Kardeshev scale.
After type II, population growth is limited by the speed of light.
Let's suppose that space travel (interstellar, or just interplanetary?) kicks off. Let's suppose that we colonize Mars, or even Alpha Centauri. Well, there's a big difference between moving a thousand colonists to Mars, and moving a billion people to Mars. (What's the carrying capacity for Mars?) Even more so with Alpha Centauri.
I see exactly zero chance that, within a few hundred years, there will be enough space travel to move enough people off of Earth to significantly change the population of Earth.
In the longterm it's theoretically possibly, in the short term (in human lifetimes) we'll die on this planet trying to make it happen elsewhere. To colonize another planet will take a lots of terraforming. Terraforming takes tons of energy in manufacturing, transportation, and sustainability. Those resources will have to be mined from earth, transported to another planet, and installed there until a colony is sustainable.
A bit of history. The American Revolution was initiated by the Stamp Act. The Stamp Act was initiated because the UK government treasury was being drained by trying to sustain a distant colony. They assumed, wrongly, the colonists would help pay for the ships, army, and resources they were being subsidized. The French revolution began out of King Louis XVI draining the French treasury to support the American revolution. When famine hit and he didn't have the resources to feed his people, CHOP!
So to get a space based colony running you're going to need to convince a whole lot of people that things are going to suck for a while but the payoff is generations away. I don't see that happening in todays climate.
I think the series The Expanse gets space colonization mostly right. The Belters have it hard because space. Terrans have it hard because Earth is dying.
It depends on how colonization actually works out. If all materials would have to be delivered from earth, no way in hell. The New World would have never took off if all the wood needed for building the village had to be imported from Spain.
I'd also emphasize the financial stresses of raising a child. Young people have huge financial burdens from college, live in extremely expensive cities, and the idea of adding a child into that life seems ridiculous.
Plus we have too many people in the world as it is.
Plus intelligence is highly heritable, and many positive traits are heavily influenced by parenting and upbringing, so successful people should have as many children as possible for the good of our civiliation. It is our duty.
The core issue is the extremely high cost of housing in many cities, as well as high taxes, which can mostly be blamed on Baby Boomers for not downsizing rapidly enough and for the burden they place on the rest of society with their pension and healthcare expenses.
You can't really live like a sub saharan person if you're in the US. Just sitting in an air conditioned office for a week probably makes you use more energy than the average guy in Sudan use in a year.
I've seen coworkers manually cranking the heat up to 25C in the middle of winter, people just don't give a shit.
I live in berlin, you literally don't need heating if your building has any kind of insulation, you can just wear a sweater and be ok. But no, they even heat the damn stair cases no one uses because we have elevators.
It’s not possible to live so far apart from each other and be “carbon neutral”. All the mass required to live needs to be pushed further and the energy required grows exponentially the farther people spread out.
I don't know, hanging out in Asia makes me feel otherwise. The real results of climate change are in your face there. It's not just about being able to feed everyone.
No argument about the impact of climate change at all.
But even the IPCC report doesn't have a consensus on if food production increases or decreases from it.
For the major crops (wheat, rice, and maize) in tropical and temperate regions, climate change without adaptation will negatively impact production for local temperature increases of 2°C or more above late-20th-century levels, although individual locations may benefit (medium confidence). {7.4, Figure 7-4} Projected impacts vary across crops and regions and adaptation scenarios, with about 10% of projections for the period 2030–2049 showing yield gains of more than 10% and about 10% of projections showing yield losses of more than 25%, compared to the late 20th century
I suspect you're wrong. Economic uncertainty hammers birthrates, and this pandemic has been the ultimate demonstration of uncertainty: in the space of a few weeks, we went from a humming economy to 20% unemployment. It's a brutal reminder that in the contemporary economy you can have the chair kicked out from under you at any second, and that's not conducive to having children.
There also seems to be a lot of anecdotal evidence that people are having way less sex right now, for what that's worth.
> It's a brutal reminder that in the contemporary economy you can have the chair kicked out from under you at any second
This is how I’ve felt my entire career. There are no guarantees for future success, but family planning requires an incredible amount of stability to pull off responsibly.
I briefly looked for numbers around the Spanish flu but couldn't find any.
My gut says you will see a mini-boom though. A lot of dogs are getting adopted right now, and adopting a dog is a gateway drug to children for a lot of couples. Would be interesting to see how many kids are "happy accidents" vs intentional though. Oh, I just looked it up and one article says 45% in the US... yeesh.
The chart in the article shows a dip around the time of the Spanish flu and an over-correction a few years later. But it's probably impossible to isolate the impact of flu vs WWI.
Could definitely see an increase in accidents, but I really doubt that there will be an increase in planned births at least in the short term. Lots of economic uncertainty + general fear of going to the hospital.
That would be kind of my intuition as well, but apparently a few surveys have shown that people were so depressed by the quarantine that they stopped... being intimate.
I hoped so, but Google trends for things like "pregnancy test" should show an uptick then, and they do not. (Ignore the uptick in early april that happens every year because of april fools)
I thought the reasons would be obvious. The cost of living has inflated very rapidly in the last 8 years whereas disposable income has gone down because of high rent, debt payments and stagnant real incomes.
What are they proposing? Millenials stay in school longer than ever, take on massive debts early on, pay ever increasing rent, train themselves up to a skilled worker for a livable wage, get a massive mortgage and THEN go sacrifice more by having a kid (whose education costs will be off the roof)?
I'm 39 and have three kids aged 4, 2 and 1 month old.
I've found Jeff Atwood's post on being a parent the single best blog length overview of the emotional pros and cons of having children: https://blog.codinghorror.com/on-parenthood/
I like to think about it as kids are +1,000,000 points and -900,000 points at the same time. The average is probably a slight positive but the highs are extremely high and the lows are also pretty low. This TED talk goes into this in more detail and is also great about giving honest views of being a parent: https://www.ted.com/talks/rufus_griscom_alisa_volkman_let_s_...
To make a development analogy: think of a time when you spent a huge effort trying to solve a bug in a code base you really care about. Finding that bug was incredibly frustrating and made you question why you even got into programming. Then, you find the answer and you watch your program work again and be better than it was before. This rollercoaster of emotions with a net positive outcome parallels very closely with having children.
I really want to have kids, but I don’t feel financially capable of it. I have a very good, stable job with a high developer salary and costs of raising a child are just way, way, way too high to consider it.
I would at minimum need to be certain I have enough money to
- own a nice, safe home we cannot easily be evicted / removed from (eg due to landlord preferences), within a short commute from my workplace and any school / child care locations we need.
- have a personal savings rate that will allow me to fully pay for some child care options, school, and eventually college, and give my child some lump sum for an emergency fund when they move out on their own.
- have remaining savings rate to still achieve some of my personal goals that I’m unwilling to sacrifice over child care, like traveling / vacationing, continued education, and supporting my elderly parents when needed.
I cannot see a way to do this without earning probably upwards of $500k/year, so having children is just financially untenable for me.
If home prices near major tech centers went down, or my salary went up, then I’d love to. But as labor share of wealth stagnates and urban real estate is increasingly priced out for average families, it’s just impossible.
The primary reason? It’s super expensive. And people my age entered the workforce right before the Great Recession, which hammered their wages and they lost years of salary growth, followed by not even a decade later, a pandemic, which will do worse.
While raising a child continues to get more expensive.
I'll try to put this in a nonjudgemental way, and after a few revisions I'm still not happy with the tone of this comment. Sorry about that.
I find it really tough to harmonize the ideas that:
1) If you can't sell your labor to provide for yourself, you deserve to die.
2) You should have kids, and not only cost yourself $100,000 at least, and increase competition for resources.
The cynic in me thinks people want to see others fail so they can feel better about themselves, and more people competing for labor and capital decreasing the demand for labor will increase the number of people who society will deem unworthy of existence. By the odds, any random kid isn't going to change the world, they're just going to be another mouth to feed, and more than likely going to make things somewhat worse for everyone else. This is a blood-soaked all-against-all kill-and-die world, and what is a kid other than another knife pointed at you?
As far as I can tell, this seems about as rational as being proud to put out your own eyes with a red-hot grapefruit spoon.
As far as the "Kids give your life meaning" idea goes, giving one's parents meaning is a lot to put on a baby who can't even lift their own head, or anyone else for that matter. We're told all our lives that we're on our own, that anyone who needs anything from anyone else is weak and doesn't deserve existence (which is both morally wrong and incorrect). At the same time, it's supposedly okay to force a child to emotionally support you? That doesn't make any sense.
I can at least comprehend the racist argument, that it's one's responsibility to have kids to outcompete outsiders. I disagree with it for numerous reasons, but I can at least fit that idea in my head. Maybe that's a reason having kids squicks me out so much, is the only comprehensible argument to me I find repulsive and I've only heard it out of repulsive people.
Is the desire to have kids completely ruled by biological/hormonal factors, or a fear of ostracism for not "doing one's duty"? A lot of people I know and respect are good parents and don't regret having kids, but can't articulate why they did, so I'm not under the impression that parents are all cruel, broken assholes (though in my hometown there were numerous examples of this).
What is it about parenthood that isn't a curse on yourself and everyone else?
People don't exist without parents. The parts which are not a curse are just the joys (and struggles) of existence.
The part which is not a curse is you.
In a perfect world the ideal people to answer this question would be your parents, but I don't want to presume. We get the families we get, it's just part of the deal.
Society acts like having kids is a luxury good, and not a vital resource.
You can certainly argue that we need to have fewer kids, but to expect parents to fully bear the responsibility of raising them alone drives down the potential of the next generation.
Meanwhile, "site developers" are in a mad rush to tear down miles and miles of virgin forest and construct new cookie cutter houses they expect to sell for $300,000 each, in my city. This, in the midst of the worst unemployment crisis we've seen since the dust bowl.
There's some reasons for this... existing housing stock is old so requires renovation or maybe not available. People want also want bigger houses and maybe a little more land. So because you have the land people will use it. In places with land use restrictions or simply places that are out of room you see infilling and renovations. Schools play a big role and a lot of families want to move into neighborhoods with families in them.
About the discussions for/against having children: quit justifying your choice. Most of the time the reason you think made you choose is not the real one and any argument can be countered easily, it only opens your choice to discussion even more.
Especially justifying not having children with the state of economy, politics or social issues does not stand up to scrutiny if you look back in history.
On the other hand simply and unemotionally stating "I don't want children (right now)" is as unbeatable as they come.
this is probably the most confusing comment I've seen in this thread
the reasons people have for or for not having kids aren't real reasons because...history? or they're "easily countered"? some examples would be nice to provide context to these statements
The reasons people _give_ for/against having kids are just stories they tell themselves. We want to seem rational and we feel the need to have a rational reason for our choices.
"Economy is bad right now" and everything like this: historically the conditions to have children have been a lot worse. History meaning more than 50 years.
Above is only one example of how you can open your choice to being countered when this decision is just a personal thing that should not be up for debate imho.
I explained poorly, the intention was just to help mostly young people have a more solid stand especially against peer/family pressure.
Millenial here, born in mid-80s. Have seen or experienced:
> dot-com boom / bust (junior high)
> 9/11 (high school)
> War on Terror (college)
> student loans (probably for the rest of my life)
> the worst recession since the Great Depression, and the lasting economic / career effects that never goes away when you go through that (right when I graduated college)
> the divisive culture wars between old / young, rich / poor, establishment / anti-establishment, etc
> Trump as president
> Covid-19
> narcissistic boomer parents
> narcissistic boomers in all levels and areas of institutional leadership whose baseline modus operandi is incompetence, corruption, and greed
> and a lot more that stresses me out
From my perspective, the world is back-sliding - everything feels like its getting worse, not better. Economic data backs this - real wages are level while cost of living is increasing.
And you wonder why we are putting have having children?
It's because we do not know what economic optimism and financial security feel like.
We already know how to solve this: via tax incentivization to breed. Everyone even remotely familiar with history knows about the baby boom and knows that came about because of financial incentives from the GI Bill. Seems like the government would rather have the cheap unorganized labor of immigrants rather than do the right thing.
But on a serious note, even though my SO and I are doing very well economically (both engineers), it's still weighs heavy the thought of having a child with how expendable engineers are these days.
> it's still weighs heavy the thought of having a child with how expendable engineers are these days.
If you're working in some sort of Information technology, you're one of the least expendable employees in the labor market, at least as of March 2020. Only government and finance have lower layoff rates: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/jolts.t05.htm
I mean expendable in the sense that as an employee you can just be thrown away if the market dips. Sure, you can maybe find more work, but you probably would have to uproot (not everyone lives in SV) and that's not easy with kids. My parents did that and it sucked; 8 different schools from elementary to high school.
I thought much the same for the longest time... until we had one by accident.
Rearing a child grounds you in a way you cannot imagine at this moment. Looking back, I realize not having a kid was just me trying to avoid making any hard choices in life.
Now, when I interact with colleagues who don't have kids, I see a certain shallowness of perspective that, in retrospect, I myself was guilty of. None of them ever really grew up.
I'm sorry if it sounds condescending. It really is the truth. When it comes to a child, it's only after experiencing both sides that one can truly decide which is better.
It doesn't sound condescending, it is condescending. It can't be that hard for you to see that there are other ways of broadening one's perspective than having a kid.
Having traveled the world by now, experiencing different cultures, cuisines and work environments, there's really no analog to the experience of rearing a child. It broadens your perspective in a different manner, unlike the other ones. You are probably tired of having everyone with kids say the same thing to you again and again, in different ways. I get it. But you have to admit, there must be some fire to all that smoke.
I do agree with the other posters though: If kids are not of interest, it is better, on average, not to have one. The world is full of unwanted children. Just recognize that there is a consequence attached to not having this experience. As in other things, there's no free lunch.
Were you a millionaire early retiree before you accidentally had a child and had to go back to the rat race? Otherwise you don’t know what both sides are like, either, right?
(For what it’s worth I still think you would be happier with your kids but you don’t really know that)
Absolutely, and people who don't have kids say the same thing - but framed so entirely differently it's like different worlds.
For example: When people have kids they focus so much on them that they lose all personality, often becoming flat stereotypes of parents that are, for lack of a better word, boring or annoying to even be around. I don't care to lose who I am, so I'm not planning on kids.
Wow that's a twisted interpretation. Perhaps they become people uninterested in the trivia that used to consume them? And so seem to become boring to someone still in that frame?
Talking about condescending, that comment takes the cake.
On the other hand, there's definitely something to be said for missing an additional 18+ years of freedom that not having kids allows a person to have. That's an experience parents don't get to have and since most people are having kids in there 30's that's a lot of very prime time to sacrifice that is massively different from the few years of adulthood (their 20's) that they did experience.
As a parent I completely agree. A lot of people shouldn't have kids. The shitty parents that do have them do so out of obligations (culture or religion) or just sheer laziness, ie birth control was too hard and here we are. I question my ability as a parent everyday (as every parent should).
Some people looking for companionship or loyalty should get a dog. Because your kids aren't that.
As a parent, I agree. It's a big expense and lots of work. I personally think it's well worth it for me personally, but for a lot of people, I agree that it's not worth the headache. I don't think there's anything wrong with using that extra time/money on yourself instead.
As a parent who loves their kid, and having waited and planned before going into it, I encourage anyone who doesn't 100% want a kid to not have any, and applaud them for it.
We need <some> kids, but neither the kid, the parent nor the world will be better off by having kids whom the parents didn't want.
I imagine a vanishingly small amount of parents would say they regret having kids post-fact, but it's fairly obvious who were mentally prepared (and willing) and who weren't, when meeting other parents.
The only people that are not okay with you having kids are your parents and politicians. The former out of cultural and familiar reasons. The latter because city/town bond ratings take a hit if the population isn't growing.
