“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.
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.