Natalism and fertility
Won’t somebody think of the unconceived children?
2024-12-06 — 2025-05-30
Wherein the waning birthrate and rising costs of raising children are examined as a possible rational response, and tensions between parental transformation, population ethics, and longtermist implications are outlined.
Birth rate. How? Why?
Pro- and anti-natalism discussions are interesting.
I do not have policy agendas regarding these issues, merely questions.
1 Ethics of
What kind of ethics trades off the interests of children and parents? Is having children morally good because, for example, it brings new people into the world who experience happy lives? Is having children morally bad because, for example, it imposes costs on existing people and the environment?
Or, if we cast our moral net wider, is eating meat good because it increases demand for animals, which brings more animals into the world?
TBC
1.1 Birth as a transformative experience
Having children turns us into different people, quite literally. How should we think about the person we will become? This is the problem of transformative experiences.
1.2 Utilitarianism and population ethics
Parfit’s Repugnant Conclusion
For any possible population of at least ten billion people, all with a very high quality of life, there must be some much larger imaginable population whose existence, if other things are equal, would be better even though its members have lives that are barely worth living
2 Longtermism
I don’t have any interesting opinions about longtermism at the moment, but it’s a relevant topic for natalism. Longtermists are presumably pro-natalist.
3 Is the best way to protect children to prevent their birth?
This incorporates population growth and safetyism.
Our societally implied preferences on this issue are probably inconsistent. Some argue we prefer to spend huge sums saving existing lives at the expense of potential ones. For example, seatbelt maximalism has been argued to prevent more births than it saves lives (Nickerson and Solomon 2020). See think of the children.
4 Practical economics of children
Why is the birth rate tanking? Is that bad? There might be many things going on here, but my first guess is that it’s a rational response to the rising cost of raising children.
5 Incoming
France invented the birthrate decline in the 1700s (Blanc and Wacziarg 2019; Spolaore and Wacziarg 2019). Interesting commentary:
Gideon Lewis-Kraus, The End of Children (goes very deep into the Korean experience)
“Maybe the low fertility rate here is because people are smart. The risk-free asset in a diversified portfolio is zero kid.”
Mary Harrington has written something profound on this theme, I’m sure, but her back catalogue is so impressive I cannot choose.
Should you have children? All LessWrong posts about the topic
Louise Perry has an interesting pro-natalist take:
Robin Hanson’s Fertility Posts are interesting provocations.
Zvi Mowshowitz
GOP AGs Argue States Have Compelling Interest In Getting Teen Girls Pregnant: I don’t know the background of this site or the invective in this article, but it’s fascinating if true.
Phoebe Arslanagić-Little rounds up links on What are children for?