Having had occasion to debate about this on /r/childfree, I feel like a lot of their arguments are based on one of the following fallacies:

1) That there are "too many people." That may be true in parts of Africa, but in the developed world, the positive economic contribution of each additional person still vastly outweights the cost of their incremental strain on natural resources.

2) That depopulation in the future doesn't affect people in the present. If you're thinking of investing in a startup, what does it do to your calculus if you know that your customer base won't be any bigger in 20 years than it is today, and will be older?

3) There is no positive externality to having kids. Your average person is going to contribute millions of dollars in labor and social value (how much would you pay to save the life of a loved one?) over his or her lifetime.

4) Failure to look at the value of alternatives in incremental terms. The question isn't: what is the value of having kids versus doing a startup, it's: how much does having kids reduce my probability of doing a startup, and what is the weighted value of that relative to having kids.

5) Failure to account for the correlation between parent-child incomes. I'd say 90% of the kids from my high-income suburban middle school are now making median or above incomes. Maybe 7-10% are in the top 1% of income for their age bracket. High income people create a larger positive externality when they have kids.

6) Failure to weight the value of alternatives by probabilities. Your average person has very few alternative courses of action that is going to generate as much economic value as raising kids. Your high income person has has a greater probability of doing these things, but writing a best-selling book or founding a successful startup is far from guaranteed. So the relevant question is not: what has higher external social value, doing a startup or having a kid, but rather which of those has higher social value weighted by the probabilities that your startup will have any real success (low), or by the probability that your kid will achieve at least median economic success (quite high).

This is of course not to argue with anyone who chooses not to have kids. Nobody needs to justify personal decisions like that. But to the extent that they do try to justify it (and that's largely what /r/childfree is--people who feel the need to justify their decision), it's useful not to rely on fallacious reasoning to do so.

For individuals who weigh the risks and rewards in our society it is easy to make the judgement having kids does not make sense. A lot of things we do in modern society is that individuals value their own welfare more than the welfare of the group, and are unwilling to sacrifice in exchange for the group's future prosperity. I refuse to be a disposable slave. I value my time and my life, and I am worth more long term by not taking what seems to me as stupid risks.

My objection, again, isn't to people who choose not to have kids. My objection is to the people (and I think they make up the bulk of /r/childfree) who rely on specious arguments to justify their decision, and act like they're doing society a big favor in not having kids so they can focus on their music career.

Since the value of children vis-a-vis retirement planning is no longer as significant as it once was several centuries ago, it seems to me that there are few good material reasons to have children for most middle and upper-middle class people. Very high income people can reap benefits via inheritance, but most people don't have enough wealth for that benefit to outweight the costs (both actual and opportunity) involved in raising children.

This isn't to say that the non-material benefits of raising children cannot be significant. But these benefits are highly individual and should average out over a sufficiently large sample, so I'd expect large scale societal trends in childbearing to closely follow the financial cost/benefit analysis inherent in the decision.

It's just as significant as it always has been--we have just decoupled the relationship and created a free-rider problem in the process.

Every scheme of retirement depends on the existence of successive generations. That is true whether you're talking about traditional societies where children take care of their parents, or modern societies where the childrens' generation makes payments to the parents' generation through either social security taxes, or dividend payouts from equity ownership.

The free rider problem we've created is that everyone is eligible to take social security, even if they haven't produced offspring that will labor in the economy while the retired generation lives off their production.

Indeed, we've also created a free-rider problem along another dimension: we have lots of people in the present who benefit from the governments' taking out debt to fund services and infrastructure, but who won't create any offspring that will pay the taxes that will pay that debt.

I was referring to individual-level retirement planning. That is, does it make sense for me to invest in one or more children based on the expectation that those children will directly help me (financially and otherwise) during retirement?

Social security originated in a time when, barring catastrophic wars, it was inconceivable that the U.S. population could ever decrease. It has worked thus far because a productive younger generation has always been able to pay for a retired older generation. However, as far as I know, it was always a program whose ethical justification was that you get back what you put in, plus some return. Whether or not you have children is irrelevant.

Furthermore, if we presume that the ethical justification for social security is that one's children are going to be productive members of society, how can we adjust for unproductive children? Should parents whose children die before entering the workforce be denied social security? What if their children live, but are unemployed for many years? These are serious questions that would have to be addressed, but doing so would simply not be possible in many cases since parents tend to die before the productive output of their children over the course of their working life is known.

This is also true even when applied to future generations as a whole. A future generation can be less productive than the present one, just as one's future child can be less productive than you. If social security is an intergenerational contract that involves a transfer of wealth from the young to the old, then it's an unjust Ponzi scheme that will collapse as soon as demographic trends are no longer able to sustain it.

Ideally, the benefits received from any retirement program, whether public or private, would be dependent upon an individual's productivity over the course of their life. Any other system inevitably involves some centrally managed authority attempting to equitably transfer wealth from one set of people to another, which is a prescription for corruption.

I understand. I was pointing out what impact our national retirement policies had on individual incentives and how that translated into group incentives.

> However, as far as I know, it was always a program whose ethical justification was that you get back what you put in, plus some return. Whether or not you have children is irrelevant.

That's an abstraction. It doesn't matter if you only "take out" what you "put in." At the end of that day, somebody's kids are producing what you take out. Any retired generation inherently depends on the production of the working generation, and for a generation to retire, there has to be a working generation to take their place, which means having kids. Social security versus investing versus whatever is just a way of accounting for that basic transaction.

> Furthermore, if we presume that the ethical justification for social security is that one's children are going to be productive members of society, how can we adjust for unproductive children?

I'm speak at the group level. It's fairly irrelevant whether one person does or does not have kids, so it's useless to try and account for that at the level of Social Security. However, Social Security as an institution reduces the incentive for everyone to have kids, because they can just depend on the production of the kids of people who did. It's a free-rider problem.

> If social security is an intergenerational contract that involves a transfer of wealth from the young to the old, then it's an unjust Ponzi scheme that will collapse as soon as demographic trends are no longer able to sustain it.

It's a Ponzi scheme, but what makes it unjust? It's the circle of life, man. Your parents took care of you, and at the other end of the cycle you take care of them. The really useful insight is that it's a Ponzi scheme that's unavoidable, at least with existing technology. By and large, the human life is bookended by periods in which people are not self-sufficient and not able to produce. No matter how you abstract the underlying intergenerational transaction, you can't get away from it. We're engaging in the same intergenerational transaction people did tens of thousands of years ago--we just have a different, fancier way of accounting.

This describes retirement in general, which I have no issue with, not social security.

The unjust aspect is that you have no control over the future productivity of younger generations, which provides for your retirement. As an extreme example, how do you think China's population is going to deal with retirement once the full effect of the one-child takes effect on Chinese retirees? They didn't set that policy, but their retirement will suffer from it.

My contention is that a person's retirement should be proportional to their own life's productivity, which it is if you have built sufficient invesments and assets by your old age. I'd just prefer that governments not make promises to entire generations they can't ultimately keep.

This is the unfortunate fallacy that most make when looking to social security and its apparent dwindling in funding. You are insinuating that social services must come from taxation of individual labor, whereas our economy has successfully and continuously been moving towards a more capital based economy.

In short, where will the money come to fund future social services? More from capital, less from the individual labor of your children.

"But America as a whole won’t have gotten poorer: the money is still there to support the programs, it’s just coming in the form of capital rather than labor income. There would be no problem, at least in economic terms, in continuing the programs by adding revenue from general taxation, maybe even from dedicated taxes on capital income." - Paul Krugman http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/28/policy-implicati...

Now, we could have a future where capital really does generate production by itself (everything is automated by robots). We're not anywhere near that point yet. For the foreseeable future, even to the extent that profits from Google, Facebook, etc, are counted as "income from capital" for tax purposes, it still depends fundamentally on human labor.

We could say that we probably won't have enough younger people to take care of the older people as birth rates decrease, but I think robots and AI will be more developed by then that either more people will be available to take care of the elderly and or the robots will do it along with all other service and manual labor jobs.

No matter what happens we will adapt.

Arguably not true. Population growth rates have been decreasing in a variety of countries[1] and economists have found connections between economic growth and population growth[2].

[1]: http://www.amazon.com/The-Coming-Generational-Storm-Americas... [2]: http://scholar.harvard.edu/kremer/publications

Will it soon be my civic duty to have kids? I'll still say no.

That's a point. Also, a rock feels no pain, and an island never cries. ;)

I do not have kids and I do not plan to. If I had kids I would want to raise them right, and I know that I really wouldn't be able to do what I want to do in life and that.

Everyone dies alone.

It's all hormonal response, sure, but ultimately anything that gives you satisfaction is ultimately just ways of manipulating your neurotransmitter levels. Having kids just happens to be one for which your body has a built-in response that gets you seriously drugged up.

How old are your kids? Even with the special bond parents can have with their children that's not a guarantee things will be good. I know awesome parents who have raised horrible people. I know awesome kids who turned into horrible people after they left the nest. Most people seem to eject their aging parents into nursing homes when they are too old, because people would rather live their lives than take care of their parents. Good friendships last forever and don't require you to change diapers in the early years while convincing yourself its all worth it for the few golden moments if you don't happen to be forced to miss them because of work or just chaos.

Convincing me to want to have kids would first require me being convinced that I should want to ever get married. :)

This is true. However, if the causes for this attitude (biological or cultural) are in some way heritable, we can expect that over several centuries the attitude should disappear, or at least be significantly curtailed. (It is not clear exactly to what extent this is actually the case.)

No opinion is offered on the moral import of these matters. However, any future anthropologists will have something fun to study, surely.

Most people who seem stupid are only stupid because they lack what equally capable, but perceived as gifted or intelligent, people have. Most people have much the same genetic wetware capabilities - brain damaged people an exception - the biggest biological differences between most people are in hormones, and changes in hormones are largely a product of environment and can be changed just as knowledge can be changed. A human's potential is able to be expressed with an abundance of knowledge and the lack of enforced ideology. Allow people reference, perspective, and freedom and they will seem like smarter people than whose without. The sooner people have the best situation the better but it is never too old for someone to get smart.

Somehow, this line reminded me of Huxley's "Brave New World".

Be wary of friendships which are one sided. If a person doesn't value their own person and they constantly need you to help them that's not friendship it's dependency. I've never ejected people out of my life the first time they needed help, but I have given up on people when I realized I was wasting my time. Many people who need help can only change with their own effort.

Every relationship is one of opportunity. Think about that!

This comes from the UN convention on rights of the child. (http://www.unicef.org/crc/index_30177.html)

America, along with Somalia and South Sudan, has not ratified the convention.

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_ratification_of_the_Convent...)

I don't know much about law, but I am a fierce advocate of state rights based mostly on the idea that it is far more feasible to have a democratic government that involves millions or tens of millions than one that involves hundreds of millions. This issue is however one place where my ideas trip up. It is kind of embarrassing that we are 1 of 3 (assuming the grandparent comment is correct) countries not to ratify the treaty and the other two are an (essentially) failed state and a brand new one that has to sort its internal self out before working on such things as UN treaties.

"many people who do have kids regret it entirely"

"can't live your dreams and raise your kids right"

"reality is you will probably get a divorce, the kids will go to the mother, and you will pay"

It's the truth. Raising children without being neglectful takes a serious amount of time and money. If you don't have the money you have to go and make the money and that means paying someone else to watch your kids to take the chance of them raising them for you.

Yes, that's the reality. Statistics of divorce say so. Not only are you likely to get divorced, as there is usually more incentive to wives to ask for one, but if you live in a state which has alimony lives you could be stuck paying money.

I'm not jaded or negative. I'm an an extremely realistic (data is emotional) person who is very excited to live life well and do a lot of great things - I live in the real world, but I'm also very optimistic with what I do choose to do.

That's absolutely not true.

Here's the details: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhsr/nhsr049.pdf

Look at table 6. You'll see a 44% base rate of divorce over 20 years. Note that couples with children (specifically have children after marriage) have a way lower divorce rate (from 48% to 22% after 15 years).

And this is highly education dependent. Only a high school grad? 53% chance of divorce. College degree (the vast majority of the HN crowd)? 35% percent. (even lower for masters)

Another relevant detail is age at first marriage. Getting married < 20? 54% chance of divorce within 15 years. Married >= 25? 32% chance.

The proportion of children born outside of marriage, and more likely to not have strong father figures, is growing every year. Most mothers get custody, and most children don't have a strong father figure.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/18/us/for-women-under-30-most...

The marriage rate in the US is dropping drastically as well. Marriage doesn't make sense. Guys have nothing to gain from marriage and only things to lose. No, you don't get loyalty when you get married, and you don't get any of the other things you want. Most guys say they get less of what they want from their spouse after marriage.

http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2011/12/14/barely-half-of-u-s...

No family units means kids lose out on the value of a strong family with strong parent figures worthy of being role models.

While a 44% divorce rate is nothing for any society to brag about, I imagine it's even worse than these statistics indicate. This study didn't include marriages longer than a 20 year period. The probability of a marriage surviving also decreases in a relatively linear fashion. It's speculation, but from the data a best case estimate for the divorce rate at 25 years would be about 54%, and considering that kids typically get out of the house and go off to college in the 20-30 year period, a further increase seems likely since "staying together for the kids" ceases to be an excuse then.

I'm sure the longer term data exists, I just don't have time to look it up at the moment. If anyone has a link, it would be great to see it though.

How did you arrive at this conclusion? Looking at the rates, it is definitely far greater than linear, indeed the 5 year survival point from point X is constantly increasing (81% survival first 5 years; 90% years 15-20). Also bear in mind that "survival" includes not dying, which might throw inferring divorce rates off by a few percent at 20+ years.

Extrapolating to 25 years, you'd get a 49.5% divorce rate.

Again, demographics must be accounted for. Almost the entire audience here is in the higher education demographic which has radically lower divorce rates; you're looking at sub-30% divorce rates.

As an unmarried person, it's the latter that is of concern to me. If I had been married for 15-20 years already, the probability you cite would be more pertinent.

Which of my opinions do you want me to show are informed by data?

Parenting isn't for everybody, and I think that's a Good Thing. If it works for you, then you have my respect and support. But conversely, if you know it /doesn't/ work for you and you choose to not be a parent, that is also a decision I can respect and support.