Why wouldn’t having children in areas without malaria be just slightly more efficient than distributing malaria nets in areas with malaria, ceteris paribus?
Huh? The idea is distributing five hundred $5 malaria nets averts the death of one person who would otherwise live 50 quality-adjusted years (on average) so $50 per QALY. By contrast, you deciding to have children in an area without malaria costs $100k-$500k for maybe 75 quality-adjusted years or around $3k per QALY. Or are you saying something else?
(This is not “don’t have kids” this is “having kids is not a particularly efficient way to bring about more quality adjusted life years”.)
By contrast, you deciding to have children in an area without malaria costs $100k-$500k for maybe 75 quality-adjusted years or around $3k per QALY. Or are you saying something else?
It costs the parents $100k to $500k, but the child living 75 QALY produces an economic surplus including, lets say typically, another child living 75 QALY who produces another child living 75 QALY etc etc. Whereas the subsidized malaria net children do not appear to produce sufficient economic surplus to purchase a $5 malaria net, so are they producing enough economic surplus to produce children with 50 QALY, who are then likely to produce an economic surplus?
My point was if you are going to have people forego having children, it would make sense to forego having children where people can’t afford to keep their children alive. Environments where people can afford to spend 100k to 500k to have children who can then afford to spend 100k to 500k to have children etc etc seem like precisely where you would WANT to have children.
I think subsidizing children who will never produce an economic surplus over children who will produce gigantic (by comparison) economic surpluses is a foolish proposition.
″ if you are going to have people forego having children, it would make sense to forego having children where people can’t afford to keep their children alive”
But you don’t seem to be talking about foregoing having children, but about letting more children die by not having mosquito netting. Ignoring the morality of that for a moment, I think it’s been shown that when a people has to worry less about children surviving to adulthood, they have fewer children even beyond the rate of compensation for the deaths, and population growth slows. Though I don’t have such statistics at my fingertips and maybe my impressionistic memory of this is unreliable, don’t be too hard on me unless you can produce statistics to the contrary—i.e. that higher child mortality rates lead to a decline in population.
Besides which, giving people $5 mosquito nets is something one can actually do, while “having” people “forego having children” is meaningless verbiage unless you mean to take over the world, and trying to do that has always had a shitload of unforeseen consequences.
Sure, saving other culture’s children is a luxury consumer good, and a nice one at that. I am in favor of a program which would divert some of our entertainment dollars towards seeing if we can pull the poor parts of Africa out of its animalistic black hole.
The original discussion suggested diverting resources from having children locally so that mosquito nets could be provided to existing children elsewhere. That is what I was arguing against, somewhat elliptically I’ll admit. Some of what I left unstated is that I think it is foolish for a culture to not sustain itself. For us to provide mosquito nets to others may be sensible for a variety of reasons. But for us to provide mosquito nets to others at the expense of our own pre-eminence is long run suicide.
Cultures compete like organisms do, and in some sense as mindlessly. The cultures that survive will dominate all future discussions. If “we” stop having children so we can toss mosquito nets over the transom to other loser cultures, we will not be meaningful participants in the future of humanity, and given the mosquito net recipients failure to even be able to afford mosquito nets for themselves, neither will they. That makes it a loser proposition in my opinion which makes it stupid in my opinion.
Why wouldn’t having children in areas without malaria be just slightly more efficient than distributing malaria nets in areas with malaria, ceteris paribus?
Huh? The idea is distributing five hundred $5 malaria nets averts the death of one person who would otherwise live 50 quality-adjusted years (on average) so $50 per QALY. By contrast, you deciding to have children in an area without malaria costs $100k-$500k for maybe 75 quality-adjusted years or around $3k per QALY. Or are you saying something else?
(This is not “don’t have kids” this is “having kids is not a particularly efficient way to bring about more quality adjusted life years”.)
It costs the parents $100k to $500k, but the child living 75 QALY produces an economic surplus including, lets say typically, another child living 75 QALY who produces another child living 75 QALY etc etc. Whereas the subsidized malaria net children do not appear to produce sufficient economic surplus to purchase a $5 malaria net, so are they producing enough economic surplus to produce children with 50 QALY, who are then likely to produce an economic surplus?
My point was if you are going to have people forego having children, it would make sense to forego having children where people can’t afford to keep their children alive. Environments where people can afford to spend 100k to 500k to have children who can then afford to spend 100k to 500k to have children etc etc seem like precisely where you would WANT to have children.
I think subsidizing children who will never produce an economic surplus over children who will produce gigantic (by comparison) economic surpluses is a foolish proposition.
″ if you are going to have people forego having children, it would make sense to forego having children where people can’t afford to keep their children alive”
But you don’t seem to be talking about foregoing having children, but about letting more children die by not having mosquito netting. Ignoring the morality of that for a moment, I think it’s been shown that when a people has to worry less about children surviving to adulthood, they have fewer children even beyond the rate of compensation for the deaths, and population growth slows. Though I don’t have such statistics at my fingertips and maybe my impressionistic memory of this is unreliable, don’t be too hard on me unless you can produce statistics to the contrary—i.e. that higher child mortality rates lead to a decline in population.
Besides which, giving people $5 mosquito nets is something one can actually do, while “having” people “forego having children” is meaningless verbiage unless you mean to take over the world, and trying to do that has always had a shitload of unforeseen consequences.
Sure, saving other culture’s children is a luxury consumer good, and a nice one at that. I am in favor of a program which would divert some of our entertainment dollars towards seeing if we can pull the poor parts of Africa out of its animalistic black hole.
The original discussion suggested diverting resources from having children locally so that mosquito nets could be provided to existing children elsewhere. That is what I was arguing against, somewhat elliptically I’ll admit. Some of what I left unstated is that I think it is foolish for a culture to not sustain itself. For us to provide mosquito nets to others may be sensible for a variety of reasons. But for us to provide mosquito nets to others at the expense of our own pre-eminence is long run suicide.
Cultures compete like organisms do, and in some sense as mindlessly. The cultures that survive will dominate all future discussions. If “we” stop having children so we can toss mosquito nets over the transom to other loser cultures, we will not be meaningful participants in the future of humanity, and given the mosquito net recipients failure to even be able to afford mosquito nets for themselves, neither will they. That makes it a loser proposition in my opinion which makes it stupid in my opinion.