Given the State of the World, Is It Irresponsible to Have Kids? | Hacker News Reader

Given the State of the World, Is It Irresponsible to Have Kids?

nytimes.com

15 pointsmykowebhn25 comments

Open articleView on HN

Ah yes, the state of the world:

- Lowest global poverty rate of all time (<3%)

- Lowest global childhood mortality rate of all time (<4%)

- Lowest incidence of child labor ever (<17%)

- Most wealth per capita ever

- Highest literacy rate of all time (86%)

- Lowest CO2 emissions per $ of GDP since 1950

- Highest % of people living in a democracy (70%)

A horrible world to raise kids in. Definitely.

All data from https://ourworldindata.org/. Great resource.

Overall agreed on these, but to nitpick, the world has gotten less democratic over the past decade.

57% in 2005; just under 56% in 2015; probably a bit lower now. (not sure where you get 70% from).

from https://ourworldindata.org/democracy

Ah, I was including anocracies in the number because they are technically democracies and still an improvement over autocracies. Should have rephrased as "70% live in at least a partial democracy"

Conveniently ignoring the existential threat humanity faces from climate change.

https://ourworldindata.org/co2-and-other-greenhouse-gas-emis...

All the democracy and economic growth in the world won't matter a damn if you're starving and on fire.

Humans have shown the ability to adapt to climate change before (Little Ice Age or even the real last Ice Age). There’s no reason to believe we won’t be able to tackle global warming.

Will there be some hardship? Yes. Will it be worse than the “nasty, brutish, and short” life most people had throughout history before the 20th century? I doubt it very much.

There is every reason to believe the real cost of climate change will be in the 10s, perhaps hundreds, of millions of lives.

If you want to class that as “some hardship”, that’s your prerogative.

Percentages, not absolutes. Most of your list could equally be phrased as, highest number of people living...

Not to mention deliberately missing the greater point.. Very much the apocryphal story of the peak time to be alive for the thanksgiving turkey. I mean there are plenty of good argument against the substance of the article without resorting such tactics.

Like seriously, was it ever a good time in history to have kids?

Given the state of the world, it's irresponsible to not have kids -- if you're a maker, giver, and lover of the neighbors, lands and wildlife surrounding you.

If you're a doughy-handed politician or jr. totalitarian central planner, be my guest; don't have children.

Let the adults and our awesome kids take care of the planet. You've tried to ruin it; we'll fix it. Your time is done.

People have been claiming the world is getting overpopulated for centuries it seems, yet we always find a way to raise that bar. We could use a bit more optimism in the media...

How about adopting? Or fostering?

Awesome idea! Unfortunately, there is essentially no adoption in my country of Canada (single-digit infant adoptions annually in most provinces, nation wide).

It’s inexplicable, given that thousands of families are waiting years without success for a child, and many more have simply given up.

The government agencies are either incompetent beyond human comprehension - or are architected to actively suppress adoption.

The options presented to a prospective young mother who cannot care for her child are: Abortion, or Abandonment (to a terrible institutional care system); Adoption is basically not an option.

The barrier to entry for adoption is ridiculously high in the united States. Not only are you beholden to the ethics and morals of some agency but the hard cash necessary is significant ($10k+ in many cases). It's a badly broken system that is ripe for fixing.

It’s irresponsible for NYT editors to have kids.

This article is weird because it assumes we’re in a finite, zero sum game. People are creative. More smart people is really good for the world as they create things, help others, etc.

Journalists like this need to get a basic economics background to realize that it’s not just humans using stuff up and then we’re gone. We reuse the same atoms over and over. Information doesn’t even really need atoms in the same way.

Look at the population explosion closely...look at the numbers and geographic locations...I don't think we're getting "more smart people..."

That’s the problem I’m talking about. NYT is writing articles like this being read by precisely the areas of the globe we want increased population.

But to expect continuous growth in a finite system is naif, even accounting for optimization and reuse. As an example, a mass of x humans will still need x*1500 calories a day at least; the bigger x, the bigger the strain on the planet.

Who’s expecting continuous growth? Population tends to level out with urbanization and education.

Food can be grown much more efficiently. If we get to the point of needing 1500 calories then we’ll be drinking soylent and having offworld farms long before we break the world.

It’s such a phenomenally large population if you’re just trying to grow x*1500 calories that we can hit it in hundreds of years. So should not factor into anyone decision to have kids.

Simple answer: yes. The single biggest positive change you can make towards climate change is not to have children. This outweighs any other change you can make (going vegan, not flying, etc) by 5-10 times [https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jul/12/want-to-...]

Complex answer: well, it's complicated. If everyone stopped having kids... well, that's not going to work either.

If that's the single biggest positive change then we're doomed.

1. Given the lack of other constraints, humans tend to use the maximal resources available. If the world population dropped to 10 million, but those 10 million people used the bounty left behind by the 7 billion and used private jets to go everywhere, we'd still be screwed.

2. The goal is net-zero by 2050. Without any other change, that means 0 humans by 2050? Stopping having babies isn't going to get anywhere near that. For population change to have any effect on the environment, it requires a drop in population into 9 figures in a decade or three. Nuclear war is the only way to achieve that, and that's not going to be too friendly to the environment...

3. Net Zero is achievable without drastic solutions. There are lots of better options, but the backstop is carbon sequestration. At a cost of $100 - $300 per ton, that's tens of trillions for net zero. Incredibly expensive, but achievable for the modern economy. A lot easier than removing a few billion people from the planet in a few decades.

Even if some people stop having kids to help the environment, billions of people will continue to have kids either because they dont know, believe, or care about the implication. No one is advocating "drop the population to 10M."

And yet, places like the New York Times write articles like this one saying that stopping having kids is some sort of solution. It's not.

did this article say 100% of people should stop having kids?

It's the single biggest change the average individual can have.

Climate change isn't going to be solved by lots of individual actions. The whole planet could go vegan overnight and we're still doomed.

If we're going to have any meaningful impact on climate change, we need to deal with it on a total war footing.

But that's not going to happen.

It's quite possible to go carbon-negative, assuming you're well off. A family of 4 being carbon-negative is going to do more for climate change than a carbon-positive family of 2.

I couldn't read the article because of the pay wall, but this stuff creeps me the fuck out. Genocide is wrong but convincing a certain demographic to not have children is somehow okay, even if it produces a similar result.

I bet this article doesn't include this map https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birth_rate#/media/File:Countri...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com