News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on The Unrealized Horrors of Population Explosion. Parent comment

Re:The Unrealized Horrors of Population Explosion by wutbrodo on Monday June 01, 2015 @02:06PM (#9640808)
This comparison is a really bad one. The amount of resources a dog consumes is very very very very far below the cost of raising a child (~$250k in the US, up to age 18). And that's just til age 18! There's another 80 years of adult life after that, and the rate of consumption only increases (especially if they themselves have children etc). I think your key error here is counting unproductivity of the pets as an issue: from the perspective of resource consumption, that's not a bad thing.

This may sound like a pedantic complaint about your point, but the fact of the matter is that the average DINK couple who decides not to have kids is going to be using massively less resources, despite having a lavish lifestyle as a substitute. I agree that discretionary resource consumption is a perhaps-underrated concern when compared with raw population, but the point you're making really has nothing to do with that.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:The Unrealized Horrors of Population Explosion by dragonwriter on Monday June 01, 2015 @02:08PM (#9640824)
> And that's just til age 18! There's another 80 years of adult life after that

Well, if you assume an average life expectancy of 98 years, but I'm not sure why you would do that.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:The Unrealized Horrors of Population Explosion by wutbrodo on Monday June 01, 2015 @03:46PM (#9641596)
I can think of a couple of reasons:

1) I'm not obsessive enough to think that making an estimate of life expectancy far in the future is a good use of time when it has no impact on the point I'm making.

2) More directly: more than 25% of 16 y/o's are expected to live to 100[1]. We're talking in this thread about rich DINKs in high-income countries, and income and life expectancy are correlated; According to a recent study by UMich, those in the top quintile of income born in _1940_ have a life expectancy at age 55 of 90 years old[2]. It seems an extraordinary claim to say that life expectancy won't climb by (at least) another few years for the richest cohort of people in the world over the next ~century.

If you're going to be childishly pedantic, at least try and be accurate.

[1]http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2011/aug/04/live-to...

[2] http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2014/04/18/the-richer-you-are...

I'm aware that life expectancy at age 55 is not the same as LE at age 18, but at-birth life expectancy numbers aren't available broken-down by income, for obvious reasons. It turns out that (unsurprisingly), the rich have a very low mortality rate before age 55, so this doesn't particularly skew the numbers.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:The Unrealized Horrors of Population Explosion by TheGrassyKnoll on Monday June 01, 2015 @04:51PM (#9642061)
The real win is that their non-existant spawn use zero resources in the future.
[ Parent | on HN ]