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Comment by NonContro | Hacker News Reader

If we want to avoid carbon emissions and save the environment then we should be paying poor people in the 3rd world not to have children.

Offering vasectomies to 25 million young males across Africa in return for $200 in goods or cash would cost less than the USA's annual aid to the continent but do far more for poverty and development.

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Since you have a history of posting slurs to HN and getting banned for it, I've banned this account.

If you don't want to be banned on HN, stop veering in that direction in particular, and stop posting flamebait generally.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Less extreme would be offering family planning in the form of condoms and birth control globally. You don't have to incentivize people to change their behavior, but help them achieve what they already want.

The optics of paying people in a culture not your own to not reproduce are problematic, yes? Besides, we know how to get people to have fewer children. Raise their standard of living.

Raising standard of living has a multi generational lead time, and is unproven to work across cultures.

> If we want to avoid carbon emissions and save the environment then we should be paying poor people in the 3rd world not to have children.

Impact is far from obvious; the immediate result you'd expect would be that someone else has the children instead.

I can't think of a reason why that would be the case. Who would be having more kids and what in their lives and circumstances is changing?

What's changing is that someone else is having fewer kids.

https://www.straightdope.com/21341212/if-i-hadn-t-killed-52-...

I still don't follow why that would be, and the link is no help.

Suppose you persuade a fly to have fewer children, perhaps by killing it.

How much lower will the fly population be thanks to your intervention?

Flys reproduce until they are at the carrying capacity, and their environment does not have the resources to support more. This is not the case for humans, which are nowhere near their carrying capacity.

The average income in the US is 68K and the average woman has 1.7 children. The average income in Niger is $1k (adjusted for local costs), and the average woman has 6.8 children. Women in the US could have dozens of children, and none of them would starve (literally) due to social safety.

Even if you assumed families are limited by their ability to feed their children, one person not having kid doesn't mean some other family now has more money.

I see no reason why one person not having a child would mean another has more, as resources are not shared, and if they were, most people aren't bound by resources anyways

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