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Comment by collyw | Hacker News Reader

Someone else on HN commented that the poor need to stop reproducing in order to improve equality. At first I found the comment kind of troubling, but the more I think about it the more it seems to make sense.

Watching this video kind of backs up the point to a degree, even though the topic is immigration.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPjzfGChGlE

Can someone come back with a decent counterargument? I haven't been able to yet.

(It's worth remembering that a good percentage of people reading this will be in the top 1% despite not being "rich" by western standards).

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Who would be considered "poor", however? Unemployed individuals, or simply low-earning ones, and in which country? Giving the declining birth rate in first-world countries, reducing reproduction in rich countries would further increase the population imbalance between rich and poor countries.

It must also be asked, is improving equality a goal worth pursuing? You could improve equality by making every single individual dirt-poor. Improving average living standards would be a better in my world-view - and by all metrics, that has been going up since the start of the industrial revolution.

Birth rates almost invariably go down as a society gets richer and more educated - therefore the goal of improving average welfare could be better served by improving the lives of third-worlders directly, which would naturally decrease their birth-rates in the long-term.

Another argument could be that many "poor" individuals have positive economic impact - they are consumers of goods increasing overall economic output, or provide useful labor at a low price, allowing many others to have goods and services they could not otherwise afford.

His argument is akin to arguing that the Soviets lost WWII because they lost so many more soldiers than the Germans. But that's not what happened. The Germans might have had a higher score, but the Red Army still pushed them all the way back to Berlin and Hitler died in a bunker. Success is measured in achievements, not by lack of failure.

For the poor to stop breeding would be ceding their one and only competitive advantage. Humans, and for that matter, life on Earth in general, aren't "judged" (in the sense that extinction/flourishing is a judgment) based on how many failed organisms they produce. Rather, that determination is based on how many successful organisms are produced.

As residents of richer countries, we're conditioned to breed at or around the replacement level and to view each failure as a catastrophe. So when we see those 80 gum balls being added each year to his misery containers, we're viewing it through the lens of seeing the failure. But in poorer countries, people adapt to the increased chance of failure by having more kids. They breed well above the replacement level knowing that, in all likelihood, not all of those kids will succeed. From that perspective, you need to focus on that 1 or 2 gum balls being allowed into the richer countries. That's the success. And having fewer kids runs contrary to that goal.

conditioned to breed at or around the replacement level

The concept to read up on here is r/K selection. Life is certainly judged by how many offspring, but there are various strategies for producing them, and one of the trade-offs is number vs. investment in each. Among all animals humans are far at the r-strategy end (high parental investment).

But different societies choose slightly different points, probably related to their history of farming. And the richer countries today are those traditionally towards the r-strategy end.

Birth rate is a function of poverty. It's high in poor places, since the childhood survival rate is low, and you need extra children to help support family and community.

As standards of living increase, birth rate drops, until it's at a sustainable 2-per-family, like it is in rich countries.

Force poor people to have less kids, and you keep them in poverty. Improve their living situations and they'll have less kids.

I think there are a lot more factors that just wealth involved in the number of children. Religion being one. Culture being another.

I didn't say anything about "forcing" people to have less kids. But I do think we should encourage them. It would cost very little to feed people in extreme poverty, could you offer them that as an incentive not to have children? Offer them enough food for a family of three. If they want to have 5 kids, its themselves who will suffer? (Thats just a suggestion that I haven't thought through in any depth, I am sure there will be plenty of flaws in it).

On a side note, China has been growing very rapidly in the last few decades, and they had a one child policy for much of that.

Maybe read an introduction to eugenics?

I don't see that as a counterargument, more of a strawman. Eugenics is based on the gene pool not on relative levels of wealth (as I understand it).

Honestly, if you live in desperate poverty, why would you want to bring a child into the world knowing the amount of suffering that its is likely to live through? Yet the poorest people seem to be the most likely to have the most children.

Maybe another way of phrasing the headline would be:

"The poor are reproducing far faster than the rich"

It doesn't sound as shocking then.

Most people who are that poor are not educated enough about reproduction to prevent childbirth due to lack of sexual contraceptives or information about safe-sex. They are born to absolute poverty and know little outside of their little town or country. Sex to them might just be seen as something you do with little to no consequence or something that just comes easily.

What you see as suffering might be seen as normal daily life to them which is terrible. The way most children in richer countries live might seem foreign to them. That being said, infant mortality is also very high in those countries so a chunk of those children born will not make it past 20 years old.

I do believe that as countries get richer the people of the country start having more responsibilities and jobs and those overwhelm the time available to take care of kids.

It might also be that having kids increases your economic prosperity in the case of many poor individuals - extra manual labour on a farm, additional household income, and a retirement strategy for when you are older and incapable of supporting yourself independently.

poor are not educated enough about reproduction to prevent childbirth

Many people say this. But it's worth knowing that, historically, lots of societies firmly limited reproduction when they were as poor as (say) most of Africa is now. The methods varied.

I can only think of China as an example of purposely limiting reproduction, what others are there?

Right, 20th century China is the example of government limiting reproduction which springs to mind.

What I had in mind was people limiting their own. In the west the main mechanism was delayed marriage (i.e. saving up a socially approved amount of money first) which kept us well away from starvation 500 years ago. In china/japan I believe the pattern was more infanticide (in the same period) but know less about this.

>Honestly, if you live in desperate poverty, why would you want to bring a child into the world knowing the amount of suffering that its is likely to live through?

Having children is a fundamental human activity. It gives people purpose, connection, novelty and a million other things I can't think of since I'm not a parent or a mother.

As you say, many poor people have many children. Perhaps you should look into what giving birth means to them rather than just assuming they're selfish idiots.

It was you who called them "selfish idiots" not me. I know exactly what giving birth means.

>why would you want to bring a child into the world knowing the amount of suffering that its is likely to live through?

This statement is all but calling them selfish idiots. Your question is nothing but a self serving rhetorical for conclusions you already made.

No its not. A lack of thought is closer to what I was thinking. It takes a lot of effort raising a child, especially in poverty. I don't think of that as selfish.

You have in fact scratched the surface of a very important and fundamental insight about human society. The conclusion that I have come to is that blaming institutions and policies is basically wrong. Blaming circumstances is wrong. It is the people of a society that determine what that society is, full stop. If tomorrow everyone in the united states were made to be good with high intelligence, high morality and so on, all of our problems would disappear. People get caught up on "You can't define what a good person is so you are wrong" or "a person is the result of nature as well as nature." These points are actually irrelevant. Just because you can't define something precisely with modern methods doesn't mean anything. And the way that a person becomes a certain way doesn't matter. The face remains that it is people who do and create everything and therefore the characteristics of those people determine the outcome. So if you don't like something, don't go to a protest. It would be infinitely more impactful to educate and mentor a child you know. But it would be much less noisy and visceral, so not many people do it even if they are aware of how important it is. Anyway, besides giving these poor countries the tools to succeed, there is nothing we can do. Like was pointed out in the video, allowing all the best people to leave and come here only makes the situation worse. Also eugenics is good. Take a moment to actually think about eugenics before disagreeing with me. Most people never get past the hurdle of seeing past the propaganda where eugenics means Nazi concentration camps and forced sterilization. There is more than one way to skin a cat and the benefits of eugenics not only include saving billions from needless suffering at the hands of genetic diseases (ie most diseases directly or indirectly) but also preventing our country and the world from slipping into a dark eventuality that can be recognized immediately after my aforementioned insight: letting the scales of a society slide toward "Petty and stupid" will, like magic, cause any country to fall into a third world state.

It is against the rules to comment on voting so I won't. But the lack of any counter-arguments is astounding, let alone coherent ones.

There's a subreddit for what you're looking for:

https://reddit.com/r/changemyview

Lots of interesting debate happens there.

I might do, though I find the discussion generally of a higher quality here than on reddit.

You might be pleasantly surprised. There are focused subreddits which are quite ruthless and thorough in their moderation style. For example, the modal discussion on /r/NeutralPolitics is far more productive and informed than on Hacker News. /r/AskHistorians is similarly remarkable. These subreddits require insightful commentary with citations to scholarly sources - anecdata, off-topic banter and trolling are virtually eradicated.

Hacker News fosters higher quality discussion than most subreddits because it's smaller and has a much higher floor for the scope successful moderation. But look at this thread: people are throwing around uninformed opinions about basic economics left and right. Outside of technical disussion, Hacker News discussions often fracture into arguments where people talk past each other and reinvent entire fields from first principles.

I think HN is nearly as good as you can expect a general discussion forum to be, but the focused, well-moderated subreddits for specific topics are clearly better for useful discussion.

I have seen a few discussions on the change my view subreddit and its better then average, but I would still say its a fair bit lower than the standard of discussion here (at least for the subjects I saw).

China managed to virtually eliminate poverty from the 70’s to today. I think Africa and Latin America can do the same, they have the resources.

The troubling aspect of it aside, a policy like that would result in a net negative for everyone else. Global industries rely on poverty to guarantee an abundance of low-paid (or not paid at all) workers. In their absence, they'd either need to be replaced by bringing wealthy people into poverty, or we'd have to brace for an economic upheaval as traditional industries are disrupted (which would likely also create poverty).

Wow, that video is ... something.

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