6 Comments

Your quotations are less pro-natalist than they are anti-anti-natalist. His conclusion (even if it's a rhetorical one) is that complainers should kill themselves, not that anyone should have children.

Expand full comment

> Nietzsche died childless, while Catherine Pakaluk has eight kids

For a man to have a child, it requires the consent of another person. For a woman to have a child, it requires only her own decision.

Expand full comment

The problem is that for millions of people for whom life is unending mental and emotional anguish, the vast majority of people want the government to force you to endure that. For what purpose? What could possibly justify the invasion of bodily autonomy and increased societal costs, not to mention increased competition for resources?

Expand full comment

People should have exactly as many children as they desire but the idea advanced by some that a smaller population will be a disaster are wrong.

Smaller populations will not be a negative but will help humanity soften the impact of climate change and save the other species we share the planet with by protecting their shrinking habitat.

Robots equipped with artificial general intelligence (thanks Elon) will wipe our aging asses and grow and prepare our food.

Young people will have less competition for jobs so their wages will rise and with less demand for housing the cost of the existing housing stock will become more affordable.

Nobel prize winning economist Paul Krugman looked at low birth rate Japan and penned an amazingly optimistic report on its economic conditions. "In some ways, Japan, rather than being a cautionary tale, is a kind of role model - an example of how to manage difficult demography while remaining prosperous and socially stable.

Expand full comment

We aren't going to get such robots with a shrinking population. https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/after-eating-software-will-bite-the

> Young people will have less competition for jobs so their wages will rise

Were you unaware of how wages have been going up since the Industrial Revolution even as population increased? Or how the Japanese economy has been stagnant while its population declined?

Expand full comment

As there's a drive into deep left field by Castellanos, it'll be a home run. And so that'll make it a 4-0 ballgame...

If you're going to copypasta the last four paragraphs into so many of Dr. Caplan's posts, could we at least see some citations--specifically, how close we actually are to Rosie from the Jetsons existing, how people are going to cope with a generational wipeout of wealth (most Anglophonic individual wealth is tied up in home values--not saying it's a good thing, just is), and when Dr. Krugman penned that analysis. Is it still valid now, with public debt at over 250% of GDP and the Japanese government repeatedly saying that the window is closing before inexorable decline?

Expand full comment