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dimension10 comments on One Life Against the World - Less Wrong
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Cost of a first-world child is.... checks random Google result $180,000 to get them to age 18. Cost of saving a kid in Africa from dying of Malaria is ~$1,000.
Right now having children is massively selfish, because there's options that are more than TWO magnitudes of order more effective. It'd be like blowing up the train in order to save the deaf kids from the original post :)
Not necessarily. A full argument would consider the opportunities available to a child you raise -- it's perfectly possible for a single first-world child to be a more productive than 180 kids in Africa.
There's also the counter-point (to my previous point) that having children discourages other people from having children, due to the forces of the market (greater demand for stuff available to children => greater costs of stuff available to children). Of course, the effect on demand is spread out to stuff other than just stuff available to children, so overall this does not cause an equal and opposite reaction.
If you successfully teach your child to be utilitarian, effective altruist, etc., though, the utility of both previous points are dwarfed by this (the second point is dwarfed because the average first-world child probably wouldn't pick up utilitarianism, EA). I'm not sure what the probability of a child picking up stuff like that is (and it would make one heck of a difficult experiment), but my guess is that if taught properly it would be likely enough to dwarf the utility of the first two points.