“why should my children have to bear this incredible burden?”
Nevermind the economic burden of looking after anybody else: I can think of few greater psychological burdens than knowing I was brought into the world primarily in order to look after just my parents when they were old, or—perhaps even worse—because my parents figured that they and their peers might enjoy their public spaces more if they were decorated with children. I would resent parents who thought like that a great deal, I think.
“They see their 90 neighbours holding out their hands expecting to be looked after”
I think it’s the other way around! People deliberately having children in order to have somebody around to do all the work when they are elderly seem to be the ones “expecting to be looked-after”!
Suppose a terminally-ageing population such that each generation is 50% the size of the previous one: each adult would need to generate an economic surplus of 100% during their working life so that the next generation had sufficient resources to care for them. This seems difficult, I know, and I am glad we have social safety nets for people who fail to do this (paid-for by the people generating more than 100% economic surplus), but:
Firstly, it’s not as difficult as it seems: if the work you do only earns you £20 per hour but your employer generates a profit of £40 per hour of your labour—in other words your £20 of labour generates £40 of goods or services—then you have probably generated the requisite 100% surplus. Note that dividing the annual profits of a medium-sized company by their employee count generally yields a surplus figure of several thousand percent: the fact that only 2 to 8 percent of this 3000-odd percent is typically set-aside by the company (in the form of a pension contribution) to provide for the employee at the end of their lifetime of labour seems to me like a problem with how companies work, not a problem with some other entirely unrelated people not having enough children.
Secondly, no matter how difficult generating sufficient surplus was, intentionally planning to generate less and use the labour of some large number of children to make-up the shortfall seems like an incredibly selfish choice, to me. (Difficult to do “explain, not persuade” on this one, I admit! I think it just seems wrong as essentially a final, non-instrumental value, and I don’t think “it’s natural”, “it’s just the way of the world”, or “there’s no other way” are sufficient justification for inflicting that burden on the beings one is supposed to love and protect above all others.)
Separately: we absolutely have the resources to support our ageing population! The UK’s purchasing-power-adjusted GDP per capita is just over £50,000. Meanwhile, the highest birthrates and largest family sizes are almost-universally found in regions with catastrophically low domestic product per capita. Speaking for myself, I would prefer solutions involving better distribution of our really-quite-plentiful resources over solutions involving manufacturing people and expecting them to do the work for us.
Nevermind the economic burden of looking after anybody else: I can think of few greater psychological burdens than knowing I was brought into the world primarily in order to look after just my parents when they were old, or—perhaps even worse—because my parents figured that they and their peers might enjoy their public spaces more if they were decorated with children. I would resent parents who thought like that a great deal, I think.
over solutions involving manufacturing people and expecting them to do the work for us.
Putting aside the fact one can expect one’s children to look after oneself in old age, or that one can have children in part because it is necessary for cultural forms to continue, without it being their ‘primary purpose’, your phrasing here suggests that you have a fundamentally different idea of what it means to have children to me.
I’d be curious to know more about which situations you think having children is acceptable?
After all, I could phrase having children like so: “The great selfishness of creating people who never asked to exist, placed in a position of massive helplessness and dependence for 8 years, who are inevitably imprisoned in some way and forced to do things they do not want to do, and who are then brainwashed by their captors.”
“I’d be curious to know more about which situations you think having children is acceptable?”
Difficult question! I suppose I’d have to say something like “we’d need to figure-out how much work it takes (for the economy as a whole) to support all concurrently-living generations at a decent standard of living and then develop social policies aiming for roughly that number of children”. I realise there are lots of problems with this, including:
If the economic output (measured in person-lifestyles) per capita is below 1 it’s physically impossible
I’m assuming that “a decent standard of living” is definable
I’m assuming that “economic output” is fungible, can be amortised across any number of people, etc.
I’m assuming there are points of diminishing returns where adding more work (and/or sharing output between fewer people) fails to yield correspondingly higher standards-of-living and thus there is some optimum point where the curves intersect (this seems likely to me but of course might not be true)
Even if this all hangs together, it doesn’t say anything about what policies might get us to this right number of people! Many such policies might move us in the right direction population-wise but be extremely harmful for other reasons (eg. “if population gets too high, drop bombs on cities at random” or “if population gets too low, establish quarterly unprotected-sex quotas”)
Despite all these problems, I think it’s the best I can do! I definitely don’t think we should be having children purely because we want them for biological reasons, or because they will make us happy, or whatever, without also having strong reasons to think we can actually give them a good quality-of-life: it would be preferable to me for us to suffer than for us to create children without being confident they can have a good quality of life.
Nevermind the economic burden of looking after anybody else: I can think of few greater psychological burdens than knowing I was brought into the world primarily in order to look after just my parents when they were old, or—perhaps even worse—because my parents figured that they and their peers might enjoy their public spaces more if they were decorated with children. I would resent parents who thought like that a great deal, I think.
I think it’s the other way around! People deliberately having children in order to have somebody around to do all the work when they are elderly seem to be the ones “expecting to be looked-after”!
Suppose a terminally-ageing population such that each generation is 50% the size of the previous one: each adult would need to generate an economic surplus of 100% during their working life so that the next generation had sufficient resources to care for them. This seems difficult, I know, and I am glad we have social safety nets for people who fail to do this (paid-for by the people generating more than 100% economic surplus), but:
Firstly, it’s not as difficult as it seems: if the work you do only earns you £20 per hour but your employer generates a profit of £40 per hour of your labour—in other words your £20 of labour generates £40 of goods or services—then you have probably generated the requisite 100% surplus. Note that dividing the annual profits of a medium-sized company by their employee count generally yields a surplus figure of several thousand percent: the fact that only 2 to 8 percent of this 3000-odd percent is typically set-aside by the company (in the form of a pension contribution) to provide for the employee at the end of their lifetime of labour seems to me like a problem with how companies work, not a problem with some other entirely unrelated people not having enough children.
Secondly, no matter how difficult generating sufficient surplus was, intentionally planning to generate less and use the labour of some large number of children to make-up the shortfall seems like an incredibly selfish choice, to me. (Difficult to do “explain, not persuade” on this one, I admit! I think it just seems wrong as essentially a final, non-instrumental value, and I don’t think “it’s natural”, “it’s just the way of the world”, or “there’s no other way” are sufficient justification for inflicting that burden on the beings one is supposed to love and protect above all others.)
Separately: we absolutely have the resources to support our ageing population! The UK’s purchasing-power-adjusted GDP per capita is just over £50,000. Meanwhile, the highest birthrates and largest family sizes are almost-universally found in regions with catastrophically low domestic product per capita. Speaking for myself, I would prefer solutions involving better distribution of our really-quite-plentiful resources over solutions involving manufacturing people and expecting them to do the work for us.
Putting aside the fact one can expect one’s children to look after oneself in old age, or that one can have children in part because it is necessary for cultural forms to continue, without it being their ‘primary purpose’, your phrasing here suggests that you have a fundamentally different idea of what it means to have children to me.
I’d be curious to know more about which situations you think having children is acceptable?
After all, I could phrase having children like so: “The great selfishness of creating people who never asked to exist, placed in a position of massive helplessness and dependence for 8 years, who are inevitably imprisoned in some way and forced to do things they do not want to do, and who are then brainwashed by their captors.”
Difficult question! I suppose I’d have to say something like “we’d need to figure-out how much work it takes (for the economy as a whole) to support all concurrently-living generations at a decent standard of living and then develop social policies aiming for roughly that number of children”. I realise there are lots of problems with this, including:
If the economic output (measured in person-lifestyles) per capita is below 1 it’s physically impossible
If the economic output per capita is close to 1 we run into the Tyranny of the Rocket Equation
I’m assuming that “a decent standard of living” is definable
I’m assuming that “economic output” is fungible, can be amortised across any number of people, etc.
I’m assuming there are points of diminishing returns where adding more work (and/or sharing output between fewer people) fails to yield correspondingly higher standards-of-living and thus there is some optimum point where the curves intersect (this seems likely to me but of course might not be true)
Even if this all hangs together, it doesn’t say anything about what policies might get us to this right number of people! Many such policies might move us in the right direction population-wise but be extremely harmful for other reasons (eg. “if population gets too high, drop bombs on cities at random” or “if population gets too low, establish quarterly unprotected-sex quotas”)
Despite all these problems, I think it’s the best I can do! I definitely don’t think we should be having children purely because we want them for biological reasons, or because they will make us happy, or whatever, without also having strong reasons to think we can actually give them a good quality-of-life: it would be preferable to me for us to suffer than for us to create children without being confident they can have a good quality of life.