I agree it’s a bit more nuanced than it seems at face value—my alternate universe self would likely have different friends because some of my friends would have died in childhood, and this wouldn’t matter so much to my alternate self. But to my current self, it’s a super big deal if half of the people I currently care about would have died young! And I think that’s the point Jason is making.
He’s being pedantic, but has an important underlying point—it’s not clear what comparison is being made in terms of terminal value for these advances (note: I prefer the current world, but I think that’s because I’m focusing on the lucky existing humans, rather than the never-conceived).
Human mortality is still 100% overall, and it’s not made clear exactly WHY it’s better to have a smaller population of under-5 children (comparing the world where 2 children are created per couple, and most live to adulthood, vs 6 being conceived, 2 lost before or during birth and 2 lost before age 5).
Don’t you think it matters to the parents? And, for that matter, to the older siblings? To the child’s friends—if they live long enough to make friends?
Do you actually think an infant or young child is just… replaceable?
While I agree with you that reducing child mortality is one of the big wins of progress, I have a sense that you’re reasoning about it the wrong way?
Like, I think many (most? Nearly all?) people in the long past did have the view that infants or young children are replaceable, because it was adaptive to their circumstances, and their culture promoted adaptive responses to those circumstances. [Practices like not naming a child for a year are a strategy for the parents to not get too attached, and that makes more sense the less likely it is that a child will last a year.] If they saw the level of attachment our culture encourages parents to have to their infants, they would (rightly!) see it as profligate spending only made possible by our massive wealth and technological know-how.
And so in my view, the largest component of the benefit from being in a low infant-mortality world is that parents can afford to treat their children as irreplaceable, which is better for everyone involved. [Like, in the world that’s distant to ameliorate the likely pain of child mortality, also the people who survive have their early experience of the world characterized by distance and low parental investment, including nutritional investment.] The longer you expect things to last, the more you can invest in them—and that goes for relationships and friendships as well.
Do you actually think an infant or young child is just… replaceable?
Not directly, for any given child. But I think potential children are at least partially fungible. Whether it’s better to have 3 children who live for decades, or 6 children, three of which only live a few years and 3 who live for decades is a very hard question.
I don’t know how to value a short life, compared to no life at all. I do think it’s an irrelevant distraction (in this context) to compare one short life to a different individual’s long life.
Not the OP, but I do think that an infant is not worth much except their sentimental value to their family. A nitpick: “replaceability” is rather different from “worthlessness.” Humans are obviously pretty replaceable, as evidenced by us all being replaced in around half a century. The question that is interesting to ask is, how much does a society improve (economically?) when its childhood mortality falls?
I do think that an infant is not worth much except their sentimental value to their family.
All meaning is in our heads. That doesn’t make that meaning any less real. If someone places a lot of meaning on their infant dying, then the infant had a lot of value. If you want to put a dollar value on it, then you can ask the family how much they would pay to bring their child back to life. I would expect most people would pay a lot.
True, but the value is to them. (And what they pay to save the infant has a major signaling component. From what I see of my grandparents who lived in a much more traditional era (Iran’s modernization is more recent.), they did not value young children that much, and recognized the reality that they could just have another child relatively cheaply.) That value will be discounted heavily in my utility function, as it does not contribute either directly to me or to the core needs of my society. (Kind of reminds me of Malthusianism; Humanity right now could probably live a lot less bullshitty if it had controlled its population more intelligently.)
Yes, and not just in this case. Value is always to some individual: There is no value outside of someone’s brain. When we say “value to society”, that’s shorthand for “the aggregation of the value inside every individual’s head”.
Money measures some of the value inside people’s heads: You pay $20 for a shirt, and I can tell that you value the shirt by at least $20. When I go for a walk, I’m not paying anyone, but that doesn’t mean the value is $0.
I agree it’s a bit more nuanced than it seems at face value—my alternate universe self would likely have different friends because some of my friends would have died in childhood, and this wouldn’t matter so much to my alternate self. But to my current self, it’s a super big deal if half of the people I currently care about would have died young! And I think that’s the point Jason is making.
The point I was making is just that child mortality (before age 5) used to be ~50%. Edward is admittedly being pedantic.
He’s being pedantic, but has an important underlying point—it’s not clear what comparison is being made in terms of terminal value for these advances (note: I prefer the current world, but I think that’s because I’m focusing on the lucky existing humans, rather than the never-conceived).
Human mortality is still 100% overall, and it’s not made clear exactly WHY it’s better to have a smaller population of under-5 children (comparing the world where 2 children are created per couple, and most live to adulthood, vs 6 being conceived, 2 lost before or during birth and 2 lost before age 5).
That’s really not clear to you?
Don’t you think it matters to the parents? And, for that matter, to the older siblings? To the child’s friends—if they live long enough to make friends?
Do you actually think an infant or young child is just… replaceable?
While I agree with you that reducing child mortality is one of the big wins of progress, I have a sense that you’re reasoning about it the wrong way?
Like, I think many (most? Nearly all?) people in the long past did have the view that infants or young children are replaceable, because it was adaptive to their circumstances, and their culture promoted adaptive responses to those circumstances. [Practices like not naming a child for a year are a strategy for the parents to not get too attached, and that makes more sense the less likely it is that a child will last a year.] If they saw the level of attachment our culture encourages parents to have to their infants, they would (rightly!) see it as profligate spending only made possible by our massive wealth and technological know-how.
And so in my view, the largest component of the benefit from being in a low infant-mortality world is that parents can afford to treat their children as irreplaceable, which is better for everyone involved. [Like, in the world that’s distant to ameliorate the likely pain of child mortality, also the people who survive have their early experience of the world characterized by distance and low parental investment, including nutritional investment.] The longer you expect things to last, the more you can invest in them—and that goes for relationships and friendships as well.
Not directly, for any given child. But I think potential children are at least partially fungible. Whether it’s better to have 3 children who live for decades, or 6 children, three of which only live a few years and 3 who live for decades is a very hard question.
I don’t know how to value a short life, compared to no life at all. I do think it’s an irrelevant distraction (in this context) to compare one short life to a different individual’s long life.
Losing a child is one of the worst things that can happen to a person, in terms of long-term well-being. See, for example, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352827319302204, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2910450/, and https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10902-015-9624-x
Yes, in the modern world, where babies are seen as precious, that is true. It clearly wasn’t as big a deal when infant mortality was very high.
The fact that we now see babies as precious is not an arbitrary feature of the modern world with no moral valence. It is an accomplishment.
Not the OP, but I do think that an infant is not worth much except their sentimental value to their family. A nitpick: “replaceability” is rather different from “worthlessness.” Humans are obviously pretty replaceable, as evidenced by us all being replaced in around half a century. The question that is interesting to ask is, how much does a society improve (economically?) when its childhood mortality falls?
All meaning is in our heads. That doesn’t make that meaning any less real. If someone places a lot of meaning on their infant dying, then the infant had a lot of value. If you want to put a dollar value on it, then you can ask the family how much they would pay to bring their child back to life. I would expect most people would pay a lot.
True, but the value is to them. (And what they pay to save the infant has a major signaling component. From what I see of my grandparents who lived in a much more traditional era (Iran’s modernization is more recent.), they did not value young children that much, and recognized the reality that they could just have another child relatively cheaply.) That value will be discounted heavily in my utility function, as it does not contribute either directly to me or to the core needs of my society. (Kind of reminds me of Malthusianism; Humanity right now could probably live a lot less bullshitty if it had controlled its population more intelligently.)
Yes, and not just in this case. Value is always to some individual: There is no value outside of someone’s brain. When we say “value to society”, that’s shorthand for “the aggregation of the value inside every individual’s head”.
Money measures some of the value inside people’s heads: You pay $20 for a shirt, and I can tell that you value the shirt by at least $20. When I go for a walk, I’m not paying anyone, but that doesn’t mean the value is $0.