Natalism and fertility
Won’t somebody think of the unconceived children?
2024-12-06 — 2025-05-30
Birthrate. How? Why?
Pro- and anti-natalism discussions are interesting.
I do not have policy agendas regarding these issues, merely questions.
1 Ethics of
What is an ethics that trades off the interests of children and parents? Is having children a moral good because e.g. it brings new people into the world who experience happy lives? Is it a moral bad because e.g. it imposes costs on existing people and the environment?
Or if you want to cast your moral net wider, is eating meat good because it induces demands for animals that brings more animals into the world?
TBC
1.1 Birth as a transformative experience
Having kids makes you into a different person, quite literally. How should you think about the person you 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 have no interesting opinions about longtermism at the moment, but it is a relevant topic for natalism. Longtermists are presumably pro-natalist.
3 Is the best way to protect children to prevent them?
Incorporating population growth and safetyism.
Our societally-implied preferences on this issue are probably not consistent. There are arguments that we prefer to spend huge amounts of money on saving existing lives at the expense of potential ones; e.g. seatbelt maximalism has been argued to prevent more births than it saves lives (Nickerson and Solomon 2020). Cf 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 is a rational response to the increasing 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 on 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 do not know background of this site or the invective of this article, but fascinating if true.
Phoebe Arslanagić-Little rounds up links on What are children for?