“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.”
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.”