When the issue is climate change, a prevalent rationalist take goes something like this:
“Climate change would be a top priority if it weren’t for technological progress. However, because technological advances will likely help us to either mitigate the harms from climate change or will create much bigger problems on their own, we probably shouldn’t prioritize climate change too much.”
We could say the same thing about these trends of demographic aging that you highlight. So, I’m curious why you’re drawn to this topic and where the normative motivation in your writing is coming from.
In the post, you use normative language like, “This suggests that we need to lower costs along many fronts of both money and time, and also we need to stop telling people to wait until they meet very high bars.” (In the context of addressing people’s cited reasons for why they haven’t had kids – money, insecurity about money, not being able to affords kids or the house to raise them in, and mental health.)
The way I conceptualize it, one can zoom in on different, plausibly-normatively-central elements of the situation:
(1) The perspective of existing people.
1a Nation-scale economic issues from an aging demographic, such as collapse of pension schemes, economic stagnation from the aging workforce, etc.
1b Individual happiness and life satisfaction (e.g., a claim that having children tends to make people happier, also applying to parents ‘on the margin,’ people who, if we hadn’t enouraged them, would have decided against children).
(2) Some axiological perspective that considers the interests of both existing and newly created people/beings.
It seems uncontroversial that both 1a and 1b are important perspectives, but it’s not obvious to me whether 1a is a practical priority for us in light of technological progress (cf the parallel to climate change) or how the empirics of 1b shake out (whether parents ‘on the margin’ are indeed happier). (I’m not saying 1b is necessarily controversial – for all I know, maybe the science already exists and is pretty clear. I’m just saying: I’m not personally informed on the topic even though I have read your series of posts on fertility.)
And then, (2) seems altogether subjective and controversial in the sense that smart people hold different views on whether it’s all-things-considered good to encourage people to have lower standards for bringing new people into existence. Also, there are strong reasons (I’ve written up a thorough case for this here and here) why we shouldn’t expect there to be an objective answer on “how to do axiology?.”
This series would IMO benefit from a “Why I care about this?” note, because without it, I get the feeling of “Zvi is criticizing things government do/don’t do in a way that might underhandedly bias readers into thinking that the implied normative views on population ethics are unquestioningly correct.” The way I see it, governments are probably indeed behaving irrationally here given them not being bought into the prevalent rationalist worldview on imminent technological progress (and that’s an okay thing to sneer at), but this doesn’t mean that we have to go “boo!” to all things associated with not choosing children, and “yeah!” to all things associated with choosing them.
That said, I still found the specific information in these roundups interesting, since this is clearly a large societal trend and it’s interesting to think through causes, implications, etc.
When the issue is climate change, a prevalent rationalist take goes something like this:
“Climate change would be a top priority if it weren’t for technological progress. However, because technological advances will likely help us to either mitigate the harms from climate change or will create much bigger problems on their own, we probably shouldn’t prioritize climate change too much.”
We could say the same thing about these trends of demographic aging that you highlight. So, I’m curious why you’re drawn to this topic and where the normative motivation in your writing is coming from.
In the post, you use normative language like, “This suggests that we need to lower costs along many fronts of both money and time, and also we need to stop telling people to wait until they meet very high bars.” (In the context of addressing people’s cited reasons for why they haven’t had kids – money, insecurity about money, not being able to affords kids or the house to raise them in, and mental health.)
The way I conceptualize it, one can zoom in on different, plausibly-normatively-central elements of the situation:
(1) The perspective of existing people.
1a Nation-scale economic issues from an aging demographic, such as collapse of pension schemes, economic stagnation from the aging workforce, etc.
1b Individual happiness and life satisfaction (e.g., a claim that having children tends to make people happier, also applying to parents ‘on the margin,’ people who, if we hadn’t enouraged them, would have decided against children).
(2) Some axiological perspective that considers the interests of both existing and newly created people/beings.
It seems uncontroversial that both 1a and 1b are important perspectives, but it’s not obvious to me whether 1a is a practical priority for us in light of technological progress (cf the parallel to climate change) or how the empirics of 1b shake out (whether parents ‘on the margin’ are indeed happier). (I’m not saying 1b is necessarily controversial – for all I know, maybe the science already exists and is pretty clear. I’m just saying: I’m not personally informed on the topic even though I have read your series of posts on fertility.)
And then, (2) seems altogether subjective and controversial in the sense that smart people hold different views on whether it’s all-things-considered good to encourage people to have lower standards for bringing new people into existence. Also, there are strong reasons (I’ve written up a thorough case for this here and here) why we shouldn’t expect there to be an objective answer on “how to do axiology?.”
This series would IMO benefit from a “Why I care about this?” note, because without it, I get the feeling of “Zvi is criticizing things government do/don’t do in a way that might underhandedly bias readers into thinking that the implied normative views on population ethics are unquestioningly correct.” The way I see it, governments are probably indeed behaving irrationally here given them not being bought into the prevalent rationalist worldview on imminent technological progress (and that’s an okay thing to sneer at), but this doesn’t mean that we have to go “boo!” to all things associated with not choosing children, and “yeah!” to all things associated with choosing them.
That said, I still found the specific information in these roundups interesting, since this is clearly a large societal trend and it’s interesting to think through causes, implications, etc.