Work is optional. There are plenty of people who get by without it. Doesn't mean they're doing well or healthy. And for society to continue to function having children is actually not optional.
> Work is optional. There are plenty of people who get by without it. Doesn't mean they're doing well or healthy.
Except if you don't have a kid, you have better chances of staying well and healthy. That's the whole point. That's what is meant with parenthood being optional and work not.
> And for society to continue to function having children is actually not optional.
With the rate at which world population is increasing[1], I think the opposite is true. It wasn't that long ago that we reached a world population of 7 billion. Now, we're apparently more than halfway to 8 billion. How in the world can the earth support so many of us?
Yesterday, there was a post here that talked about the absolutely brutal conditions that we're raising livestock in[2]. We wouldn't need to be so god damn efficient in working livestock if we didn't have so many mouths to feed.
Second, ever single time someone has said that overpopulation was going to be the end of us, they've been wrong. To quote Wikipedia, which go so far back as Ancient Carthage and Greece:
Concern about overpopulation is an ancient topic. Tertullian was a resident of the city of Carthage in the second century CE, when the population of the world was about 190 million (only 3–4% of what it is today). He notably said: "What most frequently meets our view (and occasions complaint) is our teeming population. Our numbers are burdensome to the world, which can hardly support us.... In very deed, pestilence, and famine, and wars, and earthquakes have to be regarded as a remedy for nations, as the means of pruning the luxuriance of the human race." Before that, Plato, Aristotle and others broached the topic as well. [1]
Finally, to answer your question of "How can the world support so many of us?", I would like to point at that with every new person born, that is a new person thinking of scientific advancements that can be made, producing stuff for others, for their kids, etc.
Each group is improving but mix of groups is changing.
High IQ populations have low fertility vs low IQ groups having high. South Korea with IQ 106 has TRF of 1.17. Nigeria IQ 84 has TRF of 5.53.
A gain of IQs within groups will be dwarfed by the change between groups.
If you think IQ tests are bogus we can use other metrics, eg Europe had 2x the population of Sub Saharan Africa in 1950, now Africa is bigger but has produced no hard science Nobel prizes and no new technology (like South Korea's smartphones)
Well, if everyone stopped having kids effective immediately, we could have the population issue solved very quickly. Along with all our other problems, too, after a few decades of suffering.
If the world population is 7 billion now and will be 1,000 billion around 2055, then by my math (142.9^(1/36)) that's a growth rate of 14.8% a year. Since the current growth rate is (based on the first few hits on Google) a little over 1%, I wonder why someone would expect it to go up that drastically. Especially with global warming and everything.
> Work is optional. There are plenty of people who get by without it.
You must live in a very different world than most people do if that's the norm among your peer group.
> And for society to continue to function having children is actually not optional.
At a macro level, sure (though a slow, steady reduction in population over the next few generations might do the planet some good), but on the individual level, it's absolutely optional.
That's only if our current economic model stays the same. At the moment most developed countries rely on immigration to create growth by adding more consumers.
However, it is changing, as the world develops, fewer people are born and within a century our population growth will flatten and our global population will even decline to the 2000's level.
Children should not be made just to keep society going. That's quite a selfish reason to have a child, to be honest.
Children are literally the entities that make our shared future viable. If we don't reproduce at a sufficient rate we literally, as a species, will not be able to sustain our own existence. And considering how much more personally expensive (both in yes of resources and one's self) we have made raising children over the years it's the absolute opposite of selfish to have them.
How many people have you met that tell you that they're having children because they want to ensure the future of humanity? I'd bet not many, if any at all.
What you describe might be considered selfless, most parents have kids for fairly selfish reasons. There's (usually) nothing wrong with that, of course, but let's not try to paint a rosy picture that doesn't exist.
If the majority of people's stated reason for having children was to ensure the survival of the human race, maybe that argument would hold water.
But most people's desire to have children center around selfish things, like continuing their family line, or because their parents want grandkids, or because "that's just what you do to get to the next life stage", or because their religion pushes them to, or "John and Jane have such a beautiful child and I want one too", or because they want a small version of themselves that will love them, or truly foolish things like believing a child will save a bad marriage.
And I'm not even saying selfish acts are bad! People do selfish things all the time, and as long as those things don't harm anyone else, so what? But I wish people would give more thought to the social, financial, physical, emotional, and mental implications of having a child before doing so, rather than just taking it as a given that it's what they're supposed to do.
At least there are some people who have kids because they genuinely want to nurture, educate, and mentor a new human, but I'd be hard pressed to find someone who'd say "to ensure the future of humanity" is one of their top reasons for having children.
Having kids is not essential to society. Actually, society would be better off if we just maintained our current population level and learned to live with the resources at hand instead or ever expanding and depleting the ocean, the underground and the forests until there is nothing left.
If you consider having kids as an individual sacrifice, then maybe you are having kids for the wrong reasons.
People should not be forced to have kids to perpetuate society or because its good for the economy or because the government( of any country) says we should.
Could you please explain what happens in, say, 80 years (or so) if we collectively stopped having kids? The answer is this: human beings cease to exist. Now, that may be something you view as a goal to achieve, and in the absolutely trivial (and meaningless) sense that everything (including our existence as a species) is optional you'd have a point. Beyond that trivial and meaningless sense, however, you're simply arguing about how many children we should have.
Why is maintaining our current population level something we should shoot for? Arguably the world is already overpopulated, if you consider resource usage per person.
Let's not forget the most devastating aspect of overpopulation, more and more people around to spout the same unproven theories over the last 50 years about "forest" and "underground" depletion.
