If having children were a net cost, humanity would have gone extinct long ago—in fact, it would never have got started. The reality is, though, that on average, over a person’s life, they produce more than they consume. For evidence, look around you, and compare the modern cornucopia with 100 years ago, or 1000. The investment that parents make in raising a child is paid back (to the world, not to those parents) in the resulting adult’s life’s works. This payback is ignored by the above argument.
One controversial or taboo possibility is that an intellectually elite Less Wrong poster may have much more of an impact on technological/economic progress by investing in a child than an equivalent investment in the third-world poor. One could argue that the majority of technological progress is driven by the top few % of people (measured either through intellect or economic resources), and that people in third-world countries (i.e. those who would benefit from bed nets) aren’t really in a position to cause much impact.
Why invest the money in your child? If you want to produce smart children, donate to science camps, college funds of tech colloeges or whatever seems most promising. It seems a priori highly unlikely that the best way to invest 500k into producing top researchers or inventors (or basically anything) is by having a child yourself. Even if you have amazing genes, that would only be an argument for sperm donation.
If you want to produce smart children, donate to science camps, college funds of tech colloeges or whatever seems most promising.
The per-dollar returns on education funding are unfortunately really dismal. The choke point in our Fritz Haber/Norman Borlaug/Edward Jenner pipeline is not the amount of science education out there. It’s a combination of the low-hanging fruit being picked, insufficient investment in novel approaches and not enough geniuses. You could invest the money in far-horizon science research but 500k dries up really quickly that way. If you can have a kid with say, a 5% chance of an IQ over 155 it seems plausible that is the optimal use of that money.
Even if you have amazing genes, that would only be an argument for sperm donation.
Not everyone has sperm. But even if you do donating is really unlikely to have the same effect as finding a woman whose genes are similarly excellent and have a bunch of children with her.
The investment of 500k is certainly still sub-optimal but the lesson there is to not spend half a million dollars on your child. You can reduce this cost by having more children (which will bring the per-child cost down), by not spoiling them with status signal purchases and not paying $200,000 for an elite college education when a state-school is sufficient.
The choke point in our Fritz Haber/Norman Borlaug/Edward Jenner pipeline is not the amount of science education out there. It’s a combination of the low-hanging fruit being picked, insufficient investment in novel approaches and not enough geniuses.
Very true. Each year we produce thousands of new Ph.D.s and import thousands more, while slowly choking off funding for basic research, so they languish in a post-doc holding pattern until many of them give up and go do something less innovative but safer.
It’s a combination of the low-hanging fruit being picked, insufficient investment in novel approaches and not enough geniuses.
but the lesson there is to not spend half a million dollars on your child.
If genius is a limiting factor, and genius is often under utilized, then spending half a million on increasing the odds of full utilization of a genius may be a good investment. If you can arrange for that genius to be your own child, you would be best situated to spend that half million for maximal effect.
Is this really the case? Maybe the US and Western Europe are covered but is you have someone really smart born in a poorer part of the world how likely are they to come anywhere near their potential in terms of positive impact on humanity?
One scenario that makes it relatively more attractive is if you believe that society already provides the resources needed for similarly situated people to achieve close to their potential, so there isn’t more “room for funding” in GiveWell parlance. Another possibility is that it’s actually more expensive to have an impact than naive analysis would suggest because actually influencing other people’s children in a meaningful way is very difficult and having direct control of the environment is the most important aspect.
You are right, but I don’t think that’s relevant to the argument.
The argument isn’t that having kids makes people on net worse than before. The argument is that it makes people worse than another action would. (And even then, it’s not always suboptimal; the more costly it is to raise a child—and in the first world it is very costly—the less moral it is to raise one.)
As far as I can tell from the OP’s summary, the book could just as well be arguing that having children is a net asset… and instead of wasting resources on your one or two children, you should use them to help a dozen other people have 40 or 80 children.
This is a view I disagree with because the utility function should be evaluated over the entire support range, and maximizing child output on a local time-scale at the cost of a long-term overshoot, collapse, and dark ages (or at worst extinction) does not do that.
Well, reproduction provides a net gain to progress. Exactly what the net consequence of progress will be when all has been cast and counted remains to be seen. It’s possible that having kids = good...until having kids all of the sudden = bad.
Yes, there will be payback to the world, but not as much as if you spend the money on efficient charity (I would think).
Why do you think that? Here’s a simple model. Suppose that the value of what you do and create (excluding offspring) in your life is A. You are paid some amount B for this. (If you have an honest job, B is less than A.) Of that, you spend C on your own household excluding children, leaving B-C for either charitable giving or raising offspring. Let D be the cost of raising a child. The number you can afford to raise is N = (B-C)/D.
If you do not have a child, the value of your life to others is A-C.
If you have K children, the value of all your lives (assuming the same figures apply to your children) is (K+1)(A-C-KD).
The former minus the latter is (K+1)KD-K(A-C). This favours not reproducing only if K > (A-C)/D − 1. But suppose you have one less child than the maximum you can afford. Then K = N-1 = (B-C)/D − 1. If you have an honest job, this must be less than (A-C)/D − 1. The optimum value of K turns out to be ((A-C)/D − 1)/2 (or some value a little less than N, if that is smaller).
So the conclusion of this calculation is “be fruitful and multiply”.
If having children were a net cost over an unlimited time window, globally, at any time sufficiently far in the past for the effects to propagate, then humans would already be extinct. We can take the fact that this has not been the case so far as evidence that it isn’t the case now, but it’s not a necessary inference given that the cost of raising kids is not constant. In some cultures, one’s offspring might be considered autonomous adults by the age of fourteen with skills their parents were able to impart in their free time, whereas in the present day it’s becoming more and more important for the average adult, in order to be hired as a worker, to be credentialed by institutions which are following their own incentives to capture a greater and greater proportion of the workers’ future wealth. Other costs may rise similarly.
Additional money may enter the economy (although it’s technically possible that negative externalities render even this illusory as an increase in actual wealth,) without utility increasing; as is the crux of the argument, that wealth could be applied to more valuable causes.
Doesn’t this assume, however, that the bulk of the human population is inclined to behave rationally and consider net costs when deciding whether or not to have kids?
If having children were a net cost, humanity would have gone extinct long ago—in fact, it would never have got started. The reality is, though, that on average, over a person’s life, they produce more than they consume. For evidence, look around you, and compare the modern cornucopia with 100 years ago, or 1000. The investment that parents make in raising a child is paid back (to the world, not to those parents) in the resulting adult’s life’s works. This payback is ignored by the above argument.
One controversial or taboo possibility is that an intellectually elite Less Wrong poster may have much more of an impact on technological/economic progress by investing in a child than an equivalent investment in the third-world poor. One could argue that the majority of technological progress is driven by the top few % of people (measured either through intellect or economic resources), and that people in third-world countries (i.e. those who would benefit from bed nets) aren’t really in a position to cause much impact.
Why invest the money in your child? If you want to produce smart children, donate to science camps, college funds of tech colloeges or whatever seems most promising. It seems a priori highly unlikely that the best way to invest 500k into producing top researchers or inventors (or basically anything) is by having a child yourself. Even if you have amazing genes, that would only be an argument for sperm donation.
The per-dollar returns on education funding are unfortunately really dismal. The choke point in our Fritz Haber/Norman Borlaug/Edward Jenner pipeline is not the amount of science education out there. It’s a combination of the low-hanging fruit being picked, insufficient investment in novel approaches and not enough geniuses. You could invest the money in far-horizon science research but 500k dries up really quickly that way. If you can have a kid with say, a 5% chance of an IQ over 155 it seems plausible that is the optimal use of that money.
Not everyone has sperm. But even if you do donating is really unlikely to have the same effect as finding a woman whose genes are similarly excellent and have a bunch of children with her.
The investment of 500k is certainly still sub-optimal but the lesson there is to not spend half a million dollars on your child. You can reduce this cost by having more children (which will bring the per-child cost down), by not spoiling them with status signal purchases and not paying $200,000 for an elite college education when a state-school is sufficient.
Very true. Each year we produce thousands of new Ph.D.s and import thousands more, while slowly choking off funding for basic research, so they languish in a post-doc holding pattern until many of them give up and go do something less innovative but safer.
If genius is a limiting factor, and genius is often under utilized, then spending half a million on increasing the odds of full utilization of a genius may be a good investment. If you can arrange for that genius to be your own child, you would be best situated to spend that half million for maximal effect.
Only if you’re only allowed to have one child, for some reason.
Is this really the case? Maybe the US and Western Europe are covered but is you have someone really smart born in a poorer part of the world how likely are they to come anywhere near their potential in terms of positive impact on humanity?
One scenario that makes it relatively more attractive is if you believe that society already provides the resources needed for similarly situated people to achieve close to their potential, so there isn’t more “room for funding” in GiveWell parlance. Another possibility is that it’s actually more expensive to have an impact than naive analysis would suggest because actually influencing other people’s children in a meaningful way is very difficult and having direct control of the environment is the most important aspect.
Agreed. Plus the child themself will have a blessed life.
You are right, but I don’t think that’s relevant to the argument.
The argument isn’t that having kids makes people on net worse than before. The argument is that it makes people worse than another action would. (And even then, it’s not always suboptimal; the more costly it is to raise a child—and in the first world it is very costly—the less moral it is to raise one.)
As far as I can tell from the OP’s summary, the book could just as well be arguing that having children is a net asset… and instead of wasting resources on your one or two children, you should use them to help a dozen other people have 40 or 80 children.
This is a view I disagree with because the utility function should be evaluated over the entire support range, and maximizing child output on a local time-scale at the cost of a long-term overshoot, collapse, and dark ages (or at worst extinction) does not do that.
It’s not a book, it’s a 2013 journal article (pdf).
Well, reproduction provides a net gain to progress. Exactly what the net consequence of progress will be when all has been cast and counted remains to be seen. It’s possible that having kids = good...until having kids all of the sudden = bad.
That’s only true in a global average sense. For the cost of raising one child in America you could no doubt save the lives of several elsewhere.
Yes, there will be payback to the world, but not as much as if you spend the money on efficient charity (I would think).
Why do you think that? Here’s a simple model. Suppose that the value of what you do and create (excluding offspring) in your life is A. You are paid some amount B for this. (If you have an honest job, B is less than A.) Of that, you spend C on your own household excluding children, leaving B-C for either charitable giving or raising offspring. Let D be the cost of raising a child. The number you can afford to raise is N = (B-C)/D.
If you do not have a child, the value of your life to others is A-C.
If you have K children, the value of all your lives (assuming the same figures apply to your children) is (K+1)(A-C-KD).
The former minus the latter is (K+1)KD-K(A-C). This favours not reproducing only if K > (A-C)/D − 1. But suppose you have one less child than the maximum you can afford. Then K = N-1 = (B-C)/D − 1. If you have an honest job, this must be less than (A-C)/D − 1. The optimum value of K turns out to be ((A-C)/D − 1)/2 (or some value a little less than N, if that is smaller).
So the conclusion of this calculation is “be fruitful and multiply”.
If having children were a net cost over an unlimited time window, globally, at any time sufficiently far in the past for the effects to propagate, then humans would already be extinct. We can take the fact that this has not been the case so far as evidence that it isn’t the case now, but it’s not a necessary inference given that the cost of raising kids is not constant. In some cultures, one’s offspring might be considered autonomous adults by the age of fourteen with skills their parents were able to impart in their free time, whereas in the present day it’s becoming more and more important for the average adult, in order to be hired as a worker, to be credentialed by institutions which are following their own incentives to capture a greater and greater proportion of the workers’ future wealth. Other costs may rise similarly.
Additional money may enter the economy (although it’s technically possible that negative externalities render even this illusory as an increase in actual wealth,) without utility increasing; as is the crux of the argument, that wealth could be applied to more valuable causes.
retracted -
No, only that evolution exists.