″ if you are going to have people forego having children, it would make sense to forego having children where people can’t afford to keep their children alive”
But you don’t seem to be talking about foregoing having children, but about letting more children die by not having mosquito netting. Ignoring the morality of that for a moment, I think it’s been shown that when a people has to worry less about children surviving to adulthood, they have fewer children even beyond the rate of compensation for the deaths, and population growth slows. Though I don’t have such statistics at my fingertips and maybe my impressionistic memory of this is unreliable, don’t be too hard on me unless you can produce statistics to the contrary—i.e. that higher child mortality rates lead to a decline in population.
Besides which, giving people $5 mosquito nets is something one can actually do, while “having” people “forego having children” is meaningless verbiage unless you mean to take over the world, and trying to do that has always had a shitload of unforeseen consequences.
Sure, saving other culture’s children is a luxury consumer good, and a nice one at that. I am in favor of a program which would divert some of our entertainment dollars towards seeing if we can pull the poor parts of Africa out of its animalistic black hole.
The original discussion suggested diverting resources from having children locally so that mosquito nets could be provided to existing children elsewhere. That is what I was arguing against, somewhat elliptically I’ll admit. Some of what I left unstated is that I think it is foolish for a culture to not sustain itself. For us to provide mosquito nets to others may be sensible for a variety of reasons. But for us to provide mosquito nets to others at the expense of our own pre-eminence is long run suicide.
Cultures compete like organisms do, and in some sense as mindlessly. The cultures that survive will dominate all future discussions. If “we” stop having children so we can toss mosquito nets over the transom to other loser cultures, we will not be meaningful participants in the future of humanity, and given the mosquito net recipients failure to even be able to afford mosquito nets for themselves, neither will they. That makes it a loser proposition in my opinion which makes it stupid in my opinion.
″ if you are going to have people forego having children, it would make sense to forego having children where people can’t afford to keep their children alive”
But you don’t seem to be talking about foregoing having children, but about letting more children die by not having mosquito netting. Ignoring the morality of that for a moment, I think it’s been shown that when a people has to worry less about children surviving to adulthood, they have fewer children even beyond the rate of compensation for the deaths, and population growth slows. Though I don’t have such statistics at my fingertips and maybe my impressionistic memory of this is unreliable, don’t be too hard on me unless you can produce statistics to the contrary—i.e. that higher child mortality rates lead to a decline in population.
Besides which, giving people $5 mosquito nets is something one can actually do, while “having” people “forego having children” is meaningless verbiage unless you mean to take over the world, and trying to do that has always had a shitload of unforeseen consequences.
Sure, saving other culture’s children is a luxury consumer good, and a nice one at that. I am in favor of a program which would divert some of our entertainment dollars towards seeing if we can pull the poor parts of Africa out of its animalistic black hole.
The original discussion suggested diverting resources from having children locally so that mosquito nets could be provided to existing children elsewhere. That is what I was arguing against, somewhat elliptically I’ll admit. Some of what I left unstated is that I think it is foolish for a culture to not sustain itself. For us to provide mosquito nets to others may be sensible for a variety of reasons. But for us to provide mosquito nets to others at the expense of our own pre-eminence is long run suicide.
Cultures compete like organisms do, and in some sense as mindlessly. The cultures that survive will dominate all future discussions. If “we” stop having children so we can toss mosquito nets over the transom to other loser cultures, we will not be meaningful participants in the future of humanity, and given the mosquito net recipients failure to even be able to afford mosquito nets for themselves, neither will they. That makes it a loser proposition in my opinion which makes it stupid in my opinion.