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gwern 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.
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).
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.
This also holds true for their positive impacts too. Not much good science is conducted by Africans in Africa.
That's not "very obvious" to me at all.
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.