Rieder's argument against having children seems incredibly egocentric to me. Our children will inherit a hellhole, and he doesn't want to subject them to it. Might as well kill yourself while you're at it.
The issue is that without children, there will be no experience of the hellhole. As terrible as humans have been for the rest of the life on this planet, we are becoming more conscious of it, and I think intelligence is a worthwhile trait to preserve. Since immortality is a fiction, children are the way to do it.
Children are very adaptable. It's us old people who will suffer through change. I mean, in the US, college freshmen have grown up in a world where you can be jailed for discussing encryption and kicked out of the airport for sharing a name with a suspected terrorist and police use military gear, and they're doing fine. For the most part.
We see how the world is changing, and we're horrified. For our children, that will just be the way things are. I am optimistic that some aspects will even be better. Our great-grandparents would say the same about our world now, and we're only around to experience it because they chose to have children.
That doesn't have to mean everyone needs to have children or everyone needs to have multiple children.
I'm not proposing that people curb procreation, just that the logic you proposed does not talk about the magnitude of procreation that would be 'optimal', so to speak.
The thesis (which seems absurd, and most will not accept it), is that coming into existence is an overall harm.
Whether one accepts that or not, human life is demonstrably not /good/ for almost all other life on this planet, since we compete with those resources and. As Elizabeth Kolbert points out, humans are causing the 6th great extinction.
> Bryan Caplan ...
Is a member of the Cato Institute, which is anti-population control.
I'd mow my lawn and everyone in my neighborhood's twice a week for a year (and snowplow the sidewalks / Michigan) if I could take a break from the kids for a couple days.
I have an acquaintance who borrowed someone's goat for a few months to deal with her grass. Unfortunately, she also had a deck that surrounded a portion of her house. The goat destroyed[1] the deck (and I believe a portion of the siding). Having a relatively large animal (for a house) with hooves running (galloping) around on a wood structure isn't necessarily a good plan if you care about that structure.
1: Well, maybe not destroyed. Achieved the equivalent of 10-20 years of normal wear in months may be more appropriate.
This is not a good reason to have kids if that is your only reason. Assuming your kids can mow your lawn from age 8 to 18 and they only cost you $100k over their lifetime (I'm guessing a conservative estimate), you're basically paying $192/week for lawncare, not including payment "in kind" parenting.
Children have also historically been an insurance policy. Should you have financial or medical hardships later, they are generally more likely to have your best interest at heart (however they perceive it) than some disinterested third party.
Sounds like the equivalent of buying a pardon for your sins from the Pope.
"Carbon offsets" are not actually sold by the environment itself -- they are just based on limits bureaucrats put in place after much deliberation, calculated conveniently enough to still allow for our current levels of consumption and pollution.
Possibly a more direct way to offset increasing the population would be to donate to things that improve living standards and the amount of control women have over their lives in countries which currently have a high birth rate.
That's very rational of you but boy do people love a good morality play. If you solved CO2 storage with a new technology you'd be stoned to death by a pack of wild journalists with copies of Evgeny Morozov's books.
I'll go one further on the slippery morality slope: What if carbon credits could be used to pay for permanent birth control (voluntarily! it must always be voluntarily!).
Based on the math above, you'd pay a woman $51480 to have her tubes tied.
Am I the only one who thinks that a shrinking population might also result in large-scale technological growth?
Scarcity often results in innovation. A finite resource like labor will result in higher salaries due to competition and innovation to increase productivity to circumvent his costs.
Conversely, a glut of labor results in low wages and societal problems as fewer positions exist than job seekers.
This appears consisten historically: After the black death in europe, workers were more valuable and this helped break the chains of serfdom and feudalism.
I am all for a smaller global population, particularly in light of the growing automation I expect to observe in the next 30 years.
> Am I the only one who thinks that a shrinking population might also result in large-scale technological growth?
The problem is the only population that's shrinking is well educated white liberals. Ironically, they're the only ones that buy that not having kids will somehow benefit the "planet".
Yup. The people who need to be told to stop having kids are the people in India, Mexico and Nigeria etc. who are currently having population explosions that have crippled their economic progress and have lead to intractable poverty, environmental mismanagement, and starvation.
India has a fairly low fertility rate compared to other countries of similar socio economic conditions, it is just that it has a very high population base and most of it is very young.
Also the fertility rate is varies significantly across the country.
If you think about it countries like Saudi, Pakistan and most parts of Africa have the highest fertility rates
On the other hand, it is exactly their (assumabley) also educated offspring that could make a difference. Cutting smart people out of the gene pool seems like a bad idea, even if they're convinced to do it willingly.
It depends on how apocalyptic you are about the future.
On the one hand, I'm pretty pessimistic about the current political will necessary to create global policy on climate change solutions. I feel we are too primitive right now; too fixated on historical inertial factors such as religion, ethnicity, and nationalism to let go and embrace the one thing that will allow global solutions to happen: tolerance.
On the other hand, I have faith in the human race that if we do get to a crisis point, that sanity will prevail and we will pool our resources to overcome these global issues. However, much pain will occur before this pooling (hopefully) takes place. For example, if projections are correct, the Persian Gulf will be uninhabitable by 2050 which will make today's refugee crisis pale in consideration.
So I say have kids, but we must instil upon them that their generation needs to wrestle the power away from the current band of old white males. They cannot stay on the sidelines because basically they are fucked if they do.
The people who would be willing to sacrifice having kids for climate reasons, should have two kids. You don't want to have next generation where everyone's parents don't care.
Working to reduce the total fertility rate worldwide to between 2.0 and 1.5 may be beneficial to the environment and to our development since it would relieve pressure on food and health systems.
After all, with the advent of AI and the rapid pace of robotics research the transition to a near-jobless society will be interesting...
So if we (ie the people addressed by the article) stop to exist, the population will continue to grow in size (4bn in Africa by the end of the century) and carbon emissions will probably catch up to where they are now in a decade or so.
You say: "I'm thinking about planting trees. A lot of them."
Children are the trees that we plant. They are our contribution to the future of our species. For most of us, they are our only contribution to the species.
So plant trees. Lots of them. Raise them up to be like you: concerned for the welfare of our species and it's only home. Humanity will need as many of their kind as we can get.
The tone of the piece is serious, but I can't help the feeling that it is a parody. How can this be serious? "Males are the weaker gender, don’t be fooled; just look at the flimsy Y-chromosome."
The issue is that without children, there will be no experience of the hellhole. As terrible as humans have been for the rest of the life on this planet, we are becoming more conscious of it, and I think intelligence is a worthwhile trait to preserve. Since immortality is a fiction, children are the way to do it.
Children are very adaptable. It's us old people who will suffer through change. I mean, in the US, college freshmen have grown up in a world where you can be jailed for discussing encryption and kicked out of the airport for sharing a name with a suspected terrorist and police use military gear, and they're doing fine. For the most part.
We see how the world is changing, and we're horrified. For our children, that will just be the way things are. I am optimistic that some aspects will even be better. Our great-grandparents would say the same about our world now, and we're only around to experience it because they chose to have children.