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Comment by mihaic | Hacker News Reader

That feels actually anti-rational, since if the people that care about the environment stop having children that means the people that are passing on their life outlook are mostly ignorant of the environment.

It must be a US thing more though, as I haven't personally heard people say fear of environmental damage to keep them from having kids.

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> That feels actually anti-rational, since if the people that care about the environment stop having children that means the people that are passing on their life outlook are mostly ignorant of the environment.

This assumes that parents successfully pass on their life outlook to their children, but if that were true then society would have never changed.

I don't share the life outlook of my parents.

It's all about averages. People, on average, will share the same broad traits and characteristics as their family. Also, depending on your age, give it a couple of decades. Time and experience have a way of shaping our character in ways we may never have expected, let alone ever desired.

To avoid repeating my comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35973362

> This assumes that parents successfully pass on their life outlook to their children, but if that were true then society would have never changed.

> I don't share the life outlook of my parents.

So the climate "birth strike" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35973163) strategy would necessarily have to have two parts to be successful: 1) refuse to have kids, 2) indoctrinate many of the ones that remain to reject their parent's outlook and adopt the strikers' outlook (e.g. through control of the school curriculum). I would expect the second point to result in scenes like this, where a kid comes home from school mad at his a parents for having him in a world with climate change: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35973070.

There’s a movement called birthstrike with people who are refusing to have kids because of concerns around climate change:

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/mar/12/birthst...

>if the people that care about the environment stop having children that means the people that are passing on their life outlook are mostly ignorant of the environment.

That argument seems rather doubtful to me.

It's not a perfect correlation, but I'd find it hard to believe that children don't share on average more of their outlook on life with their parents than with a random member of society.

It's a pretty bad, very risky "investment" in the environmental cause, though, because by the time your kids are old enough to vote, it'll be almost 20 years later already, the kids will be using up resources while they're growing up regardless of the ultimate outcome, and you can only pray in the end that they'll agree with you on values when they're adults. You can't just pump a new environmentalist out of the womb.

If your goal is to pass your life outlook to more people in the next generation, I believe you're probably likely to be successful without kids than with them. Without kids you have much more time to reach more people.

Or the ones having kids are actually more rational. Consider:

1. There is no scientific reason to believe the world is doomed. Go read some serious climatology papers and see for yourself. They're unreliable and exaggerated but even so, no doom.

2. State pensions and benefits might actually be doomed though given demographics. If the state can't take care of you in old age, you'd better hope you have kids who will.

it's irrational at the aggregate level, but rational at the individual level

many such cases

(the reverse happens a lot too)

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