Relatively few people's economic output can compare with them producing new people. If your last name is not Feynman or Curie your most valuable contribution to the society is a couple of kids.
And even if it's "all of it", if you can make some big company or semi-common job 0.00001x more efficient then that's a bigger impact than having kids.
2. Even if they did do the same thing, getting it done 30 years earlier has a bigger effect.
3. I still don't think it's right for me to take 100% credit for everything my kids do.
If you don’t have kids, their contributions won’t exist.
But importantly my kids might be more capable than me or less capable than me to effect change. Who knows!
> If you don’t have kids, their contributions won’t exist.
My choices alter a million things about the future. If we look at everything I was a critical step in causing then we're going to massively overvalue my contributions.
Also, shouldn't all my contributions be chocked up to my ancestors if that's how we're doing it? Leaving me with no points of my own?
Also why is ecological footprint even important itself? Our eco system has no more reason to exist than any of its components, including humans.
Also, have fun not having anyone to take care about you when you grow old. And your retirement won't be worth shit either without a new generation to keep the economy going.
Yeah no thanks, fuck your anti-natalism. You might as well remove your own ecological footprint if you would deny your children's their existence for that reason.
What I would like to see is a norm on numbers of children. Personally, I think that having more than the replacement number - i.e. more than 2 - is straightforwardly unethical given the stress our planet is under. But by the same token, 2 or fewer is fine. And it would be nice if those who choose to have none got a little more respect for it.
We also have cultural pressures, which can shape individual behavior. We could have a culture where the default is not to have kids, but that you should not have kids unless you are stable and secure enough to have then and are prepared to invest sufficiently in raising them.