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Comment by frankbreetz | Hacker News Reader

Why are we acting like this is a bad thing? Not having a child is the single greatest thing an individual can do to reduce their carbon footprint. World economy based off of infinite growth is unsustainable. America can keep this economic model for the time being by being accepting of immigrants, but eventually, the birth rate of the entire world will be in decline and will have to base an economy of a static world population, and one that will be quite older than we are used to. Progress comes with its own challenges, doing things to raise the birthrate are not the correct answer.

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I always wonder how many people who share this opinion actually forgo having kids of their own.

I've noticed a strange phenomenon of people making statements like this and yet still have their own kids. I guess convincing potential competitors to stop having offspring would be a great way to ensure the success of your own genetic line.

I'm the opposite; I think it's good to have kids but I personally don't like kids and do not have any (and at 40, it's increasingly likely I never will).

Having children is a very multi-factor decision, so I doubt anyone forgoes for just that one reason, and a pretty impersonal one at that. Still, it has to factor in, even at a subconscious level for those who go childless or have fewer children.

Actually I'd argue that you can see this in action in birth rates right now in the USA and across most of the developed world. Having children is expensive. The standards for care and education keep getting higher. The available time for childcare is decreasing. It takes more and more education to be a fully participating adult member of society. That's a clear market signal to have less children and people are responding. The birthrate continues to fall and is below replacement in many countries, including the USA.

As a species, we appear to be regulating ourselves to prevent a catastrophic overshoot.

"genetic line" -- I mean, it's not like you're the pharoh pumping out 100s of children while subjugating those eunuchs.

Also, in a world of 10 billion peoople, it's not like any given individual has much precious DNA to pass on.

I have one daughter and I'd love her to have a sibling, but for various reasons I don't think it's going to happen, which kind of makes me sad, but not because I won't pass down my "line".

Just focusing on one small area of human achievement - there was just one single Chopin, Beethoven, Bach and Mozart. Unlike in science, no reason to suppose one of these composers 'would have come along anyway'.

Climate change is bad, because it could reduce the number of human lives.

Therefore, we will reduce the number of human lives to combat climate change.

Climate change is bad because it could catastrophically reduce the number of human lives by killing a bunch of people through famine and disease.

That’s not at all the same thing as reducing birth rates - which is voluntary and does not cause death and suffering.

Yes, but going from positive birth rates to negative could also have a catastrophic effect on human civilization and send us back to a darkage just when we were supposed to tackle global warming.

Maybe it won't be that bad, I've never ran the numbers, but intuition tells me population reduction has never been good for human civilisation.

Interesting. I am not agreeing or disagreeing with your statement.

However, it only seems different from a moralist perspective. Naturally, the result is the same: a species reaches its carrying capacity and the population declines.

Fascinating.

This is paperclip-optimizer logic. Climate change is a problem of irreversible ecological destruction and mass human suffering; pumping out more people as though it's a metric to be inflated is Missing The Point.

> Climate change is bad, because it could reduce the number of human lives.

No, climate change us bad because it can increase SUFFERING. To say that reduction of human lives is bad is to say we should be reproducing as much as possible. Have you maximized the number of people you have had sex with today?

Yes, I think people choosing not to have children is substantially better than death by climate disaster.

Clever, but incorrect. This is a rhetorical construction which falls apart if you don't overload the word, "reduce."

Climate change is bad because it can end human lives. The lives which it doesn't end may experience significant hardship and unhappiness.

Decreasing the rate of population growth does reduce the number of existing humans, but it doesn't induce that reduction by ending lives. It also doesn't increase the amount of hardship imposed on most humans.

Do you see why climate change and population reduction are not comparable?

Reducing the number of humans reduces a large amount of resource contention.

By not giving birth to more humans we're not killing people off. Alternative, as we see in many places, is war. War is definitely not the same thing as avoiding pregnancies.

How disingenuous. Choosing not to have children is not the same as death by climate catastrophe or death by any other means.

Climate change is bad for a lot of reasons (e.g. individual quality of life), in addition to that one.

It is people that might invent what is needed to sustainably integrate our technology with biology. It is not the absolute number that matters, especially with a stable population number, but if those people are living in a way that is sustainable over generations. Less people means fewer inventions, and potentially a societal collapse.

The idea that we should not birth new generations fosters an armageddon attitude, where it is now popular on at least parts of the left to believe the world will end in 12 years. So why think of what will birth generations if the world will end in 12 years?

No one is saying we shouldn't have new generations. We should stop growing the population. This means the number of births and the number of death each year would be about the same.

The max population of the earth is debatable, but the fact that there is a limit is not. A static population society will have to be generated. As far as fewer inventions, why focus on giving everyone a good education? Then we would have more than enough people to give us the technology needed to survive.

> No one is saying we shouldn't have new generations. We should stop growing the population. This means the number of births and the number of death each year would be about the same.

The problem in the west is not a growing population, but a decreasing one.

> The max population of the earth is debatable, but the fact that there is a limit is not.

Yes, but here we are talking about the US population of $327 million decreasing. The population on earth is 7.53 billion and it is growing elsewhere. Are you arguing that a reduction of the US population serves some larger purpose so we should not be concerned about our culture?

> As far as fewer inventions, why focus on giving everyone a good education? Then we would have more than enough people to give us the technology needed to survive.

I'll focus on higher education since in the US other levels are both free and mandatory.

Access to personal growth opportunities is very important. However, data indicate universities are often not the answer to that and it is also questionable if universities makes someone more creative [1]. Regardless 60% and increasing of the US population has taken some college.

In addition to this it is worthwhile considering what the less creative people are taught to follow in universities. Universities seem to be the center of our cultural decay and an anti-intellectual attitude of not teaching core ideas have taken hold in many schools.

Why do you think higher education would help create more innovation?

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Case-against-Education-System-Waste/d...

The distribution of who has children seems highly dysgenic -- the smartest and overall "fittest" women (in particular) have children late (and thus few), if at all. This is almost always an individually-optimal choice at the time.

A lot of this seems driven by economics and culture (two incomes are necessary for modern lifestyle; rewards of employment vs home are high (in financial and psychological terms); career, particularly earlier career in the more competitive tracks, is very difficult to juggle with being a parent, particularly for women). Some of this might be addressable (better childcare and child-friendly policies at top employers, especially for junior employees), but a lot of it isn't.

I think there's something worse about differential population growth rates across countries/cultures than a simple across-the-board reduction, but I don't think this is the best environment for that discussion.

>the smartest and overall "fittest" women (in particular) have children late (and thus few)

Richest and most educated =/= "smartest" and "fittest."

Even your estimation of "fittest" is totally subjective. From a natural selection perspective, the ones with more reproductive success are the fitter ones. And it's not at all established that people with high socio-economic status are genetically smarter or better on any level than low SES individuals. It's more likely to be nurture and access to resources and parenting styles that set them up for success.

In capitalist societies with high socioeconomic mobility (where your socioeconomic status is only loosely correlated to your parents’), there are good reasons to believe high socioeconomic status correlates to some sort of genetic fitness.

Such economies typically have strong public education, fair hiring practices, low barriers to entrepreneurship, and a strong social safety net.

The US had such an economy in the post WWII years, but economic mobility has dropped in recent years. (Probably because we gutted the educational system, and bankrupt people that get sick. Also, WWII trained an unprecedented number of mechanics and engineers in the US.)

>Such economies typically have strong public education, fair hiring practices, low barriers to entrepreneurship, and a strong social safety net.

Even then you're just assessing how well people fit into a routinized public education system or in a traditional office environment. It privileges a very specific type of skill set at the expense of many others.

It is worthwhile considering that smart is just one type of adaptiveness in certain roles within a high-functioning culture. Noone understands how the whole create a culture that enables a safe and predictable life over a large land over all ages, but we do know that extremely smart people only create a small part of living culture. However, as the collapse of Rome showed once its going away its going away fast.

The unfortunate aspect of some smart people is that we lack the wisdom to understand that the theories we fall in love with are just shadows of the reality. Even when ideas at their extreme fail we stick to them as if they are an appendix; e.g. capitalism in the extreme even after it has robbed us of meaning, communism even after it caused large-scale hunger and suffering wherever it was implemented.

The problem with the anti-human "environmental" attitude is that it misses the forest for the trees by viewing people as foreign elements in the biosphere. It is as such a theory that anyone but some smart people can spot as unadaptive to reality.

Or maybe the people that will solve this issue aren't alive today but will be part of the next generation. So it's on us to have children, educate them as much as we can, teach them how to be strong critical-thinkers, leaders, or whatever will help the next generation tackle the challenges ahead.

That's not to say that everyone should have children, some people cannot have children for a variety of reasons. But if you have a partner and you both are willing, helping the next generation be equipped for the struggles ahead should be an inspiring challenge to step up to, not to cower away from.

Why are we acting like this is a bad thing?

Is your argument that there are no downsides to a shrinking population? I'm not so sure the evidence would support such a stance.

Are there disadvantages not related to our economic system? Because without those I don't even think it would be a competition.

Lower genetic diversity, less species resiliency, lower growth for humanity across the board due to less humans exploring various problem spaces.... there are a lot of downsides to declining populations, depending on the surrounding circumstances/causes, just as there are upsides.

I’m completely drawing a blank as to why people having fewer children would be a bad thing for anyone, aside from the Idiocracy scenario. I can think of all kinds of reasons why it would be a good or neutral thing, but I can’t think of any downsides.

When there's more retirees and elderly people than younger workers to support them, how do you think our economic systems are going to survive?

Automation continues to reduce the fraction of people that need to work.

Also, we won’t need nearly as much new construction, which frees up a ton of workers.

I don’t think an aging population is likely to lead to labor shortages any time soon, at least in the US.

No one is talking about a labor shortage! The problem is a consumer shortage. Automation only makes it worse.

Aging population with a shrinking population means less people to buy goods. Automation means less people employed. This is bad for growth. Economic expansion requires increases in production and consumption.

By keeping older adults working and stopping age discrimination.

The downsides should be addressed instead of kicked further down the road. Less people on the planet is better, regardless of the economic and social challenges it presents.

> Less people on the planet is better, regardless of the economic and social challenges it presents.

To quote the dude, "Yeah, well, that's just like your opinion, man."

> Not having a child is the single greatest thing an individual can do to reduce their carbon footprint.

So what?

I say that in all sincerity. You have internalized your worldview to the point that it's a religion you don't realize you believe.

Why is reducing my carbon footprint a fundamental good? Ultimately, any explanation will come down to the meaning of life, and it is very likely that you and I might understand our purposes here differently.

I agree. Until we get our population under control we should be encouraging (not mandating) people to not have more than 2 children. Unfortunately, it is the developing world where this is largely double what is sustainable for our planet. It will eventually get solved by lack of water or food and in some cases reaching a high enough standard of living that people stop having 6 kids expecting that maybe 2 will survive.

> Not having a child is the single greatest thing an individual can do to reduce their carbon footprint.

No, it's not. Because, to start with, it's reducing someone else’s carbon footprint.

And for most people, it's not even the biggest thing they can do Tor educe someone else's carbon footprint, as, for most, reducing their own potential children's carbon footprints to zero is a much smaller reduction than could be obtained by murdering someone richer (especially someone richer and less environmentally conscious.)

I hold out hope that one day we can get to a point where humans can leave the earth in a better state than when we entered it. We certainly have the intelligence to do so. So I am not throwing in the towel just yet. Of course, there is an optimal population number somewhere between 0 and infinity.

>Why are we acting like this is a bad thing? Not having a child is the single greatest thing an individual can do to reduce their carbon footprint.

Because we also care about our communities and countries (and local cultures, etc), not just the world or humanity in abstract.

I'll admit that I sped through it because I'm currently trying to wrangle a toddler but does the article present it as a bad thing? It's possible I missed it but I didn't see that. Not having kids is probably a great decision for most people.

I fully agree. The article does have some good points about the problems associated with on-average later births.

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