The Moral Case for More People on Earth

Today we’re going to cover four points that have emerged from the last few articles on growing our population, but which I haven’t covered yet:

1. Is it true that some people don’t have children because of fears of overpopulation?

2. Why having more children makes people happy

3. Why it’s ethical to promote a society with more children

4. Is it selfish to only think about humans? Should we worry about the experience of animals and plants?

1. Are People Not Having Children Because of Fears of Overpopulation?

I shared this quote last week:

I was a college student when I read Mr. Ehrlich’s “The Population Bomb.” I took it to heart and now have no grandchildren, but 50 years later the population has increased to eight billion without dire consequences. I was gullible and stupid.—David Henderson, EconLib

Soon after, I received this email:

This thing is real. But these are just anecdotes. What does the data say?

Here are the major reasons why adults choose not to have children:

Source: Tomas Pueyo, editing over Pew Research

People often have personal reasons to not have children, like just not wanting to. But there are other factors that influence their decision, over which they have much less control. Of those, the 1st and 3rd most common reasons for not wanting children are concerns about the state of the world and the environment! A full quarter of people who don’t plan on having children have concerns about the environment! And this fear is more and more common!

So yes, the panic about a growing population has a substantial impact on people not having kids, which means it’s a big contributor to the fertility crisis too. 

2. Why Children Are Good for You

Growth from 10B to 100B happens one birth at a time. If every new child was a net negative to their parents, it would be very hard to get there. Thankfully, it’s the opposite, because: 

Children are machines that transform short-term comfort into long-term fulfillment.

Yes, children consume your time, are very expensive, can cost you professional advancement, make you lose sleep, wreck your social life, cause you worries, suck all your energy… 

But having them is also one of the most fulfilling things a human can do—by design. Evolution optimizes for survival and reproduction. For millions of years, we’ve been honed to make as many babies as possible. How? By wanting sex, and by loving the result (ie, the baby). 

But how can evolution make us love the result when it’s so costly? It had to evolve a feeling that was so strong that it counterbalanced the cost of having the child. That’s why love towards children is so intense, and fulfillment when having children is unparalleled: It has to overpower how difficult it is on a daily basis.

This is why, today, a plurality of people (37%) want more children than they end up having: Life gets in the middle and they can’t achieve their dreams. A very small minority ends up with more children than they wished (10%, or nearly 4x less than those who would want more children).

Source

That’s why the US has a consistent deficit of children born vs what parents desire: 

This deficit is called fertility gap:

And the gap is big throughout most of the world, save for some very poor areas:

In other words, people want to have more children than they end up having, because children are fulfilling, even if they’re tiresome. That’s the strongest argument you can make for anything: It universally brings joy and happiness. What’s the point of life, if not to be happy? 

OK but maybe that’s selfish, and having children is bad for society? It turns out it’s not!