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waveman comments on Review: Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids - Less Wrong
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I haven't seen anyone mention the other issue with having large families. There are already more people than we can sustain at US living standards, Every extra child adds to the pressure on pollution, the environment, raw materials, land, water, and energy.
In my case we stopped at 1 child.
Partly because as one of four I felt I clearly missed out in ways that would have made a huge difference to my life. I did not want that to happen to my children.
Partly because I wanted to do other things with my life as well as raising children. Until you have children you do not appreciate the huge impact they have on time, money and most importantly on your energy - not to be a super-parent but just to be a good enough parent.
But also partly because of the "Crowded Earth" factor.
Downvoted- this is misleading. It might technically be true that we cannot sustain the population of Earth at US living standards currently, but the main reason is that a large portion of the population is nowhere near US levels of productivity. Even given this, we produce enough food for everyone on the planet with agriculture in Asia and Africa at productivity levels far below what could be achieved with common US technology. So if those people can generate enough prosperity to make houses and iPhones, which we did without the benefit of borrowing tech from more advanced societies, then the world can easily sustain many more people at US living standards.
There are certainly environmental problems remaining, but a child born today in almost any region of the world has the highest expected standard of living so far in history. As Caplan points out in the book, new people have large positive externalities, and their contributions more than make up for any drain on resources. And of course environmental problems tend to become less severe as societies develop.
A person enjoying life is an extreme good, overpopulation is really not an issue, so have more kids!
Caplan would point out how Malthusian predictions of disaster never seem to come to pass, whereas disasters and atrocities happen whenever Malthusians get a chance to influence policy.
I would hope he would not point that out; famines and similar overshoots happened all the time throughout history, and still do, even in the past few unusual non-equilibrium centuries.
Caplan would argue, and I largely agree with him, that modern famines are caused by bad economic policies rather that overpopulation.
Are the negative effects of these bad policies increased by overpopulation?
I believe Caplan's reply is basically that choosing to have kids affects the margin very little because any abdication on your part will be picked up by developing countries, and that having a kid is a net benefit because the more people there are, the more innovations and whatnot are created (positive externalities).
Having trouble parsing, could you explain what that means, perhaps by example?
The demand for offspring is sufficiently inelastic that a Westerner refusing to have offspring is replaced by a developing country kid (or multiple kids, inasmuch as a Westerner kid consumes so many resources).
I'm having difficulty mapping that line of reasoning for some reason.
How, in practice, might a Westerner couple not having a kid exert influence on a non-Western couple having a kid? By what mechanisms are non-Western births influenced by Western births?
Prices are the obvious mechanism that comes to mind - prices of things like food or top American universities.
Wouldn't lower prices for top American universities, e.g., lower the number of children born? I am under the impression that poverty is conducive to birthing more children.
That sounds like what he might say, but I agree with Waveman. For one thing, the overall economic and environmental impact of one child in the developing world far outweighs that of one child born in poorer countries. Furthermore, if there's any detrimental impact of the bloated world population, then we need as many people as possible encouraging self-restraint, even if any one group of citizens can afford to indulge themselves.
Also, the claim that the percentage of innovators born to each generation is enough to offset the overall negative externalities is dubious at best. I'd say that our pace of innovation is still very obviously struggling to keep up with the pace our reproduction.
That's not "very obvious" to me at all.
This also holds true for their positive impacts too. Not much good science is conducted by Africans in Africa.