If the "right thing to do" is to not have kids, who do you think IS having kids?

[SavingWithBabies]

In the spirit of George Carlin and off shooting from this thread, I want to ask a serious question: if the smart people decide it's environmentally sounder to not have children, what does that do to the overall intelligence of the human species? Is this just a very intelligent way of stating that humans are doomed and the effort to raise children is a waste of time?

I don't know where else I can ask this question without risking being judged a horrible person to my face (at least if you're judging me that way here, I can't see you). But I seriously do wonder about the dynamic in which a subset of our population has decided not to have children under the guise of saving the planet (or other reasons) but the rest of the population is not doing that. If anything, they are having more children than before and those children likely have a better chance of making it to adulthood compared to the past. We know that intelligence is fairly heritable so it is passed down by genetics. It's not all genetics though. But it is enough so that if there is a massive movement by smart people not to have kids, what are the odds the dumb people will outpace the smart people and the non-heritable high IQs will not appear enough to keep the overall IQ from declining?

If you're smart enough to decide to not have kids and you do so for mostly non-monetary idealistic reasons, are you not basically voting no to the future of humans?

I'm asking this here partly because I suspect it is true however I also wouldn't be surprised if I missed something. So where did I go wrong with this line of thinking (I do see the massive assumption here that higher IQ is better but besides that...)?

[Ego]

I'm no genius so the world is probably a better place without little Egos to wreak havoc.

Twentysome years ago when we were thinking of reproducing I wholeheartedly believed that our future little Egos would live in a world that was better than the one we grew up in. If I were in my late twenties today I would not be so confident. It seems there is a good chance that kids born today will experience a great deal more suffering than we did and each subsequent generation will suffer more.

But I may be wrong.

[oldbeyond]

Fertility is already low in most developed countries. If you look at subsets of the population by education, income or wealth, it’s even lower for the educated and affluent. I see this line of reasoning more as a rationalization for people who have already decided not to reproduce. It’s not like the maternity wards are overflowing with The New Yorker-readers and their offspring. Population growth in developed countries that have it is more a function of immigration.

To me there’s rather a divide, with first world countries having crazy high consumption and some third world countries (not all, many poor countries already have modest fertility) having crazy high fertility, with the “second world” in the middle.

Given this, and given how personal the decision to have kids is, I think it’s a better strategy to focus on footprint reduction. In the west I’d say that’s the major problem, and it seems like a more inclusive strategy. Focus on not having kids and you’re in the trenches of the culture war again. Not that environmentalism isn’t there too, but I think the odds are somewhat better for those issues.

[2Birds1Stone]

Have you seen the movie, "Idiocracy"? We're already there.....

[slsdly]

As Ego says, my desire not to have children is rooted in wanting to avoid their suffering over any carbon footprint reduction techniques. Is that a vote against humanity? Yes, I agree, it is. I'm of the age now that if I'm going to have children, I should have them now. However I am convinced even the most minor inconvenience will cause most voters to toss out any government which pushes needful environmental policy. Maybe they don't deserve smart people in the future to solve their problems, because they ignore those same people today.

[FRx]

I might be misunderstanding, but it sounds as though you assume that those who choose not to have kids should in fact have kids and the ones who are having all the kids, shouldn't? If that's your argument it could certainly be valid but it's been the kind of argument which has been make for decades. If you have kids others will generally assume that you don't know what you're doing and believe that they are doing a better job with their kids. If you don't have kids, you'll be told that "it's exactly people like you who should have kids".

[Bankai]

To answer OP question directly, people who have kids are 1) people who want to have them & 2) people whom children happened to.

Why would it be right to not have kids?

It seems to me that many people who claim that they don't have kids due to environmental reasons are trying to dress up their selfish decision (i.e. don't want to spend 20 years and tons of money rising them etc.). Nothing wrong with selfishly not wanting kids, but it's difficult to admit one's reasons to others. It's much easier to make up a story of how concerned about the planet one is. Similarly to some people who don't eat meat for health reasons dressing this up as environmental/animal concerns.

The suffering argument, I don't buy it. There always was, is and will be suffering in the world. Every generation has plenty of pretexts to claim the next one will be worse off - now it's climate change, previously Y2K, Chinese taking over, WW3, communists taking over, nuclear apocalypse, nazis taking over, plagues, (insert religion) taking over... make your pick. In the meantime, every generation is better off than the previous one, at least in terms of opportunities and wealth. And even if there will at some point be fewer opportunities and wealth, this by no means implies the world will be so bad that one should not have kids. For 99.9% of human history opportunities and wealth pretty much didn't exist, yet humans were mostly happy and didn't stop procreating, even though the world around them was so harsh that 99.99% of us would not survive a year.

Likewise, if one wants to spare their children suffering, it's faulty reasoning. Being is almost always better than not being (most people with extreme birth defects are still happy they were born and would not like 'not to ever exist', even if their lives were short and full of suffering). It's like saying that one doesn't want to be in romantic relationship to avoid suffering. Yes, there probably will at some point be some suffering in each relationship, but this is not a reason to stay single since relationships have many good things about them. Kids born around now will still have mind blowing opportunities and quality of life compared to 99% of humans who ever lived.

[Jason]

Yeah, I'm with Bankai. At least the great majority of children born today get to fucking live. And their mothers too. Throw in an IPAD and some Ritalin, historically speaking, it's not too shabby. So it get's colder earlier every year. Big whoop. Buy a jacket that gets delivered straight to your fucking doorstep. Better than watching your mother die in childbirth watching her deliver your stillborn sibling and then having to marry your asshole cousin and then watching your children die in childbirth. At least to me. If you don't want kids, that's fine. But don't rationalize it with current conditions and furthermore, don't equate intelligence with understanding current conditions because who really knows what the fuck is going on any ways. "Intelligent" people used to philosophize based on basic elements, thought the sun rotated around the earth, thought it was good medicine to bleed the shit out of people and said things like "Hey, I got a great idea. New Coke!!!!"

[Ego]

Being is almost always better than not being.

I've posted this before. A philosopher who works through the arguments for being and not being.

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/perso ... being-born

[slsdly]

@Bankai, when you say it is selfish to not want children, are you then implying that it is selfless to have children? That will inform me as to how to read your post. My opinion would be not having, or having, can both be dressed up as selfless or selfish. Neither is particularly true. Nor do I believe we have any duty or obligation to procreate. So it is up to each person to decide whether they wish descendants or not. It seems very rational to me that if you believe standards of living will decline compared to what you have/had, that you would prefer not to witness your descendants living with those lower standards, even more so because of what was an avoidable problem. I don't particularly care what we had in neolithic to pre-industrial eras, given I didn't experience it. Humans tend to place greater weight on experiences with losses over gains, and I am no different in that respect.

[jacob]

Population IQ has been dropping for a while. Estimates are that levels in the most developed countries in terms of both depth and breadth (northern Europe) are now dropping as much as 7 points per generation of ~30 years (that's one standard deviation between a child and their grandparents on average). After slowly and steadily rising for decades for reasons mainly attributed to better nutrition and education, peak IQ happened for the cohorts born around 1970-1975. After that, the Flynn effect appears to have maxed out and now works in reverse and pretty fast at that too.

This Flynn reversal effect is MUCH stronger than any effect from dysgenic fertility (aka Idiocracy). The dysgenic effect is small enough to often drown in statistical noise. This is something else ... beyond genetics.

What this means is that in terms of intelligence, we should not worry about "the dumb people outbreeding all those smart people who are too busy reading the New Yorker to get pregnant" but rather that we've somehow changed something that is making everybody born today increasingly mentally slower than we used to be. Whether that's increased levels of pollution (lead, CO2, plastics, ... ) interfering with brain development; perhaps a lack of micronutrients from a more industrialized food supply; or simply because epic mistakes where made in how we run society, e.g. dumbing down media and social interactions, replacing much human thinking with computers, getting google-brain, or whatever, the material difference is not known.

[EdithKeeler]

If you're smart enough to decide to not have kids and you do so for mostly non-monetary idealistic reasons, are you not basically voting no to the future of humans?

This question seems To go well with the “are we doomed” thread. I figure ultimately it will all even out – intelligent people will have fewer children, and the “dumb” people will have more, but ultimately the “dumb”people will succumb to super flu or measles because of anti-vaccine beliefs, or beat their children to death like we’ve seen with that heartbreaking A.J. Freund story in the news this week, or they’ll eventually die of drug overdoses because there won’t be enough people to administer Naloxone when they need it. Or they’ll kill themselves with obesity.

I’m being a bit flip here, but seriously, the bigger issue is probably the income inequality that comes with the smart/dumb divide. The smart parents who are rich/smart get their kids in fancy schools (or buy their way into Stanford....) and the poor parents of smart kids are stuck sending them to increasingly crappy public schools and continuing living in crappy parts of town where they are more likely to be victims of crime and have less access to good jobs and healthcare. There was a study done that pretty clearly showed that you have to get a kid out of bad schools and bad neighborhoods by about 5 years old or it ultimately makes no difference. They looked at kids whose parents were able to get out of bad areas—kids who were really young when it happened were doing way better than their peers in the crap neighborhoods 10 and 15 years out. Kids who were older when the change came did better initially, but by 10-15 years out, there were back about even to their kids in the shit neighborhoods.

All that is to say: you may be right. More intelligent people are tending to have fewer children. More developed countries do have lower birth rates, likely for a variety of reasons—not just “saving the planet” excuses. The more access women have to education and opportunities, the fewer children she’s likely to have.

So what’s the answer? I go back to the “are we doomed?” Thread. Ultimately it doesn’t matter to me personally, and if I had kids (I’m child free but not for “save the planet” reasons), it wouldn’t matter that much to them, either. We’ll be dead before we really see effects.

Do we mandate that if you have an IQ over 125, you must have 2 kids? 140 and you have 4? 100 and you’re limited to one? 75–forget it. (I think the Nazis tried a version of that....) The instinct to procreate is the most basic one we have, so good luck with that.

And it comes down to politics. I’m actually pretty liberal, unlike I think a lot of people on this board. I do think the “haves” have a moral/societal obligation to help those who don’t. To a point. I think that taxes aren’t bad (but I want the money spent well), that good roads and good schools, etc. and adequate health care benefits society as a whole. I still firmly believe that. I think a lot of people have circumstances in life that they need help overcoming, and it’s to the benefit of us all if we help them.

But it’s hard, too, to see situations where people do get help and don’t take advantage, or who are given opportunities to change and don’t. I go back to that horrible story of A.J. Freund—his mother is pregnant with another kid. Jesus.

I’ve veered off course, I guess, from the original question, but ultimately, I think people are gonna do what they’re gonna do—have kids or not—and if we ultimately breed ourselves back to cave men in the Stone Age, I won’t be around to see it, so who cares.

[Tyler9000]

Personally I think most doomers usually give themselves way too much credit. For all we know, choosing to not procreate because you're convinced the world is coming to an end because of ________ may just be nature's way of culling out manic depression and paranoid delusion from the gene pool. The fact that so many people believe the world will slide into Idiocracy without them may indicate that we'll also get an added bonus of a little less intolerable narcissism. Things are looking up!

[Bankai]

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/perso ... being-born

I read this piece and his arguments don't convince me at all. He claims that life is a procession of “frustrations and irritations”, like hunger, thirst, thermal discomfort, menstrual pain, traffic, queuing, as well as some more serious: being single, divorced, ageing.

Maybe it's just my personal experience, but I don't see life as suffering as Benatar or Petersen does. Yes, there are not-so-great bits every now and then, but overall it's pretty damn good.

Benatar explained. “But compare that with a scenario in which that person never existed—then, the absence of the bad would be good, but the absence of the good wouldn’t be bad, because there’d be nobody to be deprived of those good things.”

I don't get this one, why does the argument 'there’d be nobody' not apply both ways, i.e. why the absence of the bad would be good if there'd be nobody to be the subject of bad?

There’s such a thing as chronic pain, but there’s no such thing as chronic pleasure

So what? Chronic pain only affects very few humans, and even they like life enough to stick around (most of them at least). Besides, why does it matter that there's no chronic pleasure? Perpetual pleasure is not required for a good or happy life. Some pleasure (as well as other positive feelings) every now and then seems to do the job for most.

It’s unacceptable that people, and other beings, have to go through what they go through, and there’s almost nothing that they can do about it.

There are many things that humans can do about what he calls 'unacceptable' and what to me seems like very minor inconveniences and trivial price to be alive. A good starting point is stoicism or Buddhism and to stop worrying about the things one can't control. This sorts almost all arguments against being he mentioned. At least for my N=1.

It's interesting that he doesn't want to share his story/background. It's the circumstances that shape humans and their worldview and it's possible that his life unfolded in a way that shaped his opinions. Or he might just be extremely neurotic. Anyway, since his basic argument (life is suffering) doesn't hold (most people consider themselves happy or very happy and very few 'opt out' from life), the whole 'better not to be born' thing doesn't hold either.

[Bankai]

My opinion would be not having, or having, can both be dressed up as selfless or selfish. Neither is particularly true. Nor do I believe we have any duty or obligation to procreate. So it is up to each person to decide whether they wish descendants or not.

Absolutely. People were having children for selfish reasons all the way until state retirement plans. One might even say, as libertarians do, that each decision is ultimately selfish and any attempt to justify it otherwise is just dressing.

It seems very rational to me that if you believe standards of living will decline compared to what you have/had, that you would prefer not to witness your descendants living with those lower standards, even more so because of what was an avoidable problem.

It doesn't seem rational to me. How do we know they will decline? How much will they decline? How much will the decline of 'standards of living' affect future human's happiness? Humans were quite happy even when they only had furs and spears (see the few remote hunters-gatherers tribes still around today), I don't see why even a 75% drop in wealth (highly unlikely this century) would dramatically decrease happiness? 75% is the drop from average spending to 1 jacob spending - plenty of people here spend around this much and not only they don't think of opting out from life but are probably happier than your average consumer.

Should we be also killing ourselves when entering old age due to all the physical and mental decline?

[EdithKeeler]

@bankai—numerous studies have shown that—to an extent—intelligence is heritable. Apparently it’s linked to many different genes, however. Of course, genetics are not a single determinant of intelligence.

I’d say we’re probably using IQ here as some easy shorthand for the discussion. Of course there are many types of intelligence, and IQ tests are probably not a perfect measure of intelligence.

I’d say that there is an assumption that having greater intelligence is more beneficial to survival of the species more than ever. While being able to outrun a Sabre toothed tiger was probably at one time a greater predictor of survival, in our current technical world, logic suggests to me that intelligence is important to survival. Being able to understand why vaccinations are important, for example. Not believing every stupid story on Facebook or Fox News. Growing crops and engineering greater crop yields for burgeoning populations. Of course, being able to operate a firearm when the revolution or apocalypse comes may be important, too....

[Jason]

So what’s the answer? I go back to the “are we doomed?”

Baby Doomers

[Bankai]

Also, consider this. Very many ancient civilisations believed that golden (and sometimes silver) ages were already past them and thought they were living in the bronze age - the worst time to be alive, end of the world incoming etc.

And yet, they created great civilisations, astonishing art and architecture, were starting families and having children...

'Decline' of civilisation on its own, real or perceived, was never sufficient to stop human life/development.

[jacob]

It seems to me that many people who claim that they don't have kids due to environmental reasons are trying to dress up their selfish decision (i.e. don't want to spend 20 years and tons of money rising them etc.). Nothing wrong with selfishly not wanting kids, but it's difficult to admit one's reasons to others. It's much easier to make up a story of how concerned about the planet one is.

In my experience, I've found it a lot easier to say that I've chosen not to have children because I'm selfish rather than out of any concern for the planet or the well-being of future generations [whether they be my children or yours]. I usually back this up with an explanation about how in between being the oldest child, one of the oldest cousins, my XGF having two children, and my mother working in daycare/kindergarten I have a good idea (although obviously not complete---still much better than what most neophyte parents can claim) of what parenting is all about and based on that I'd rather spend my life on something else. That angle makes parents or wannabe parents feel good about their choice because simplistically framing it in terms selfish/selfless doesn't require anybody questioning their values or self-image or starting any uncomfortable discussions about the future world they're committing their children to living in.

[Kriegsspiel]

I want to ask a serious question: if the smart people decide it's environmentally sounder to not have children, what does that do to the overall intelligence of the human species? Is this just a very intelligent way of stating that humans are doomed and the effort to raise children is a waste of time?

Hypothetically, it would depend on whether "smart" people have historically had more kids than "non-smart" people. Say you meant smart people with 150 IQs. What if, historically, fantastically smart 150 IQ people generally didn't reproduce, maybe because they were socially awkward or not relatable (heh) or whatever. Even though they're currently in the news saying it's a conscious decision, it wouldn't change population IQ because it would have been the historic norm. And we don't know what people will do in the future, this could be a temporary thing that doesn't impact anything.

Also, intelligent people are wrong about stuff all the time. Why would you accept they're right about something as existential as humanity being doomed? What is the benefit to you? Even if you don't have kids, do you walk around thinking about people in the future being doomed all the time? And if you incorporate their statement into your worldview at face value, are you the kind of person who gives up at life because of someone else's defeatism? Why not choose to have kids and raise them so that they can be the leaders and elites anyways? Or just have a normal, good life, which seems pretty likely right now despite the doom talk.

I don't know where else I can ask this question without risking being judged a horrible person to my face (at least if you're judging me that way here, I can't see you). But I seriously do wonder about the dynamic in which a subset of our population has decided not to have children under the guise of saving the planet (or other reasons) but the rest of the population is not doing that. If anything, they are having more children than before and those children likely have a better chance of making it to adulthood compared to the past.

AFAIK worldwide fertility has been going down, overall. I assumed you meant worldwide human population. Did you mean just in a certain country or ethnicity?

We know that intelligence is fairly heritable so it is passed down by genetics. It's not all genetics though. But it is enough so that if there is a massive movement by smart people not to have kids, what are the odds the dumb people will outpace the smart people and the non-heritable high IQs will not appear enough to keep the overall IQ from declining?

It's happened before,

The Pestis Secunda, sometimes called the "mortality of the children," took a particularly high toll of the young, who had no immunity from the earlier outbreak, and, according to John of Reading, "especially struck the masculine sex." The deaths of the young in the Second Pest halted repopulation, haunting the age with a sense of decline. In the urge to procreate, women in England, according to Polychromicon, "took any kind of husbands, strangers, the feeble and imbeciles alike, and without shame mated with inferiors."
- Tuchman, A Distant Mirror

and like Jacob said, it seems to be happening now.

If you're smart enough to decide to not have kids and you do so for mostly non-monetary idealistic reasons, are you not basically voting no to the future of humans?

I'm asking this here partly because I suspect it is true however I also wouldn't be surprised if I missed something. So where did I go wrong with this line of thinking (I do see the massive assumption here that higher IQ is better but besides that...)?

If you're looking to pin a specific reason on specific people not having kids, you'd probably have to get into their details. I don't think you can just say they're "voting no on the future of humanity" without figuring out what's actually going on. And even then... they're only voting "no" on their genetic future.

Anyways, there are surely more factors involved in high-IQ people not reproducing; environmental pollution, obesity, delayed marriage, hormonal contraception, women's education/workforce participation as Edith mentioned (in addition, wives that earn more than their husbands have 17% fewer children than the opposite), etc.

But like I said above, who cares? If anything, why don't you have contempt for them? "Hey you anti-motherfuckers, humans in the future might appreciate some smart people walking around. Start PIVing. You might even like it."

BTW, related:

Demographers debate why people have children in advanced industrial societies where
children are net economic costs. From an evolutionary perspective, however, the important
question is why some individuals choose not to have children. Recent theoretical developments in evolutionary psychology suggest that more intelligent individuals may be more
likely to prefer to remain childless than less intelligent individuals. Analyses of the
National Child Development Study show that more intelligent men and women express
preference to remain childless early in their reproductive careers, but only more intelligent
women (not more intelligent men) are more likely to remain childless by the end of their
reproductive careers. Controlling for education and earnings does not at all attenuate the
association between childhood general intelligence and lifetime childlessness among
women. One-standard-deviation increase in childhood general intelligence (15 IQ points)
decreases women’s odds of parenthood by 21–25%. Because women have a greater impact
on the average intelligence of future generations, the dysgenic fertility among women is
predicted to lead to a decline in the average intelligence of the population in advanced
industrial nations.

link