The Case Against Children

Children are the biggest threat to our society today.

At first, you might find this comment ridiculous, even barbaric. Children are cute! Children are our future. Without children, the human species could not continue. How could you be so heartless? Preying on our children!

Please hear me out. Yes, children are cute. Yes, they are evolutionarily necessary for our species to continue. Yes, family is important. No, I don’t hate your child.

But all of these comments miss the point. The more children there are, the more humans there are. The more humans there are, the fewer resources there will be for any one human. Having children is the greatest threat to our environment.

This is due to the simple mathematical concept of exponential growth.

Let’s walk through the consequences of having 0 children, versus 1 child, versus 2 children. Suppose we have a couple, Jim and Amy, who are considering having a child. Here are several possible scenarios:

Jim + Amy: 0 children

Jim + Amy: 1 child, Mark

Jim + Amy: 2 children, Mark, Melissa

Jim + Amy: 3 children, Mark, Melissa, Samuel

Jim + Amy: 4 children, Mark, Melissa, Samuel, and Robin

Now, let’s look at what that chart would look like when Jim and Amy eventually have grandchildren. Let’s assume each of their children will also have 2 children.

Jim + Amy: 0 children, 0 grandchildren

Jim + Amy: 1 child (Mark), 2 grandchildren (by Mark)

Jim + Amy: 2 children (Mark, Melissa), 4 grandchildren (2 by Mark, 2 by Melissa)

Jim + Amy: 3 children (Mark, Melissa, Samuel), 6 grandchildren (2 by Mark, 2 by Melissa, 2 by Samuel)

Jim + Amy: 4 children (Mark, Melissa, Samuel, Robin), 8 grandchildren (2 Mark, 2 Melissa, 2 Samuel, 2 Robin)

OK, it’s still not that bad. It only gets bad when you start looking at great-grandchildren and more. Again, let’s assume each of the grandchildren has 2 kids, and each of their kids has 2 kids apiece.

Jim + Amy: 0 children, 0 grandchildren, 0 great-grandchildren, 0 great-great-grandchildren

Jim + Amy: 1 child, 2 grandchildren, 4 great-grandchildren, 8 great-great-grandchildren

Jim + Amy: 2 children, 4 grandchildren, 8 great-grandchildren, 16 great-great-grandchildren

Jim + Amy: 3 children, 6 grandchildren, 12 great-grandchildren, 24 great-great-grandchildren

Jim + Amy: 4 children, 8 grandchildren, 16 great-grandchildren, 32 great-great-grandchildren

If we imagine Jim and Amy as a starting point, or “node,” then we can see that the longer away in time you travel away from the node, the more pronounced the difference in numbers of descendants becomes.

In the first generation, the “children” generation, the difference between 4 children and 1 child is only 3. But by the fourth generation, the difference between 32 great-great-grandchildren and 8 great-great-grandchildren is 24.

If we go one generation more, that would literally be 64 great-great-great-grandchildren versus 16.

That’s a difference of 48. The longer along time we travel from the initial node or couple (Jim and Amy), the greater the magnified effects of the initial decision of how many children to have.

Notice, however, that we made several key assumptions. We assumed that after John and Amy’s initial children were born, each child, grandchild, and great-grandchild only had 2 children. However, that tends to be unrealistic.

Since education positively correlates with how many children a couple tends to have, and the education a child has positively correlates with how much education his or her parent has, then it follows that if Jim and Amy have more children, their children will likely have more children, and vice versa.

So now, let’s see how this diagram would look if Jim and Amy’s children had the same number of children as their parents. In other words, if Jim and Amy have 3 children, we assume that each child also has 3 children, and the same goes for the rest of the numbers.

Jim + Amy: 0 children, 0 grandchildren, 0 great-grandchildren, 0 great-great-grandchildren

Jim + Amy: 1 child, 1 grandchild, 1 great-grandchild, 1 great-great-grandchild

Jim + Amy: 2 children, 2 grandchildren, 4 great-grandchildren, 8 great-great-grandchildren

Jim + Amy: 3 children, 9 grandchildren, 27 great-grandchildren, 81 great-great-grandchildren

Jim + Amy: 4 children, 16 grandchildren, 64 great-grandchildren, 256 great-great-grandchildren

Oh my gosh! 256 great-great-grandchildren?! We finally understand why all the Mongolians are basically descended from the (very prolific) Genghis Khan. In fact, Genghis Khan, who was born in the 1100s, is probably solely responsible for a significant part of all of our genomes. A thousand years of exponential growth is no joke.

This exponential growth can be easily calculated. If we have one child, after 4 generations, we can expect 1^4 great-great-grandchildren, which is 4. If we have four children and all of our children and their children also had four children, in the fourth generation, we might expect 4^4, or 256 great-great-grandchildren.

By this model, if Jim and Amy, had, say, 5 kids, then by the fifth generation, we could expect Jim and Amy to have 3,125 great-great-great-grandchildren. Crazy, right? But true. There’s a high chance that two people born in, say, 1865, might be responsible for 3,000 people who are currently alive. Think about how many people you know who have one of those super common last names. They will tell you they’re not related, but they probably were several hundred years ago. They probably originally came from the same mother.

Of course, the assumptions we’ve made are not fully accurate. Some of the children could die before reproducing. Not all children will have the same number of children as their parents; some more, some less. But in general, this model illustrates the huge impacts of the decision to have a child, projected over time.

For much of history, the number of children you had did not matter. It was sustainable. Back in the year 1200, it was totally fine for Genghis Khan to produce literally hundreds of thousands of future children. The total population of the Earth then was around 400 million, similar to the current day population of the United States. But, as this example illustrates, exponential increase is the reason why, today, we have a population of 7 billion, and the world’s reserves of basically everything are running out. By 2050 it’s projected that there will be 10 billion people on Earth.

10 billion people.

What’s the problem here?

Resources, unlike the human population, do not grow exponentially; in fact, many of them do not grow at all. Carbon deposits, which are responsible for coal, take millions, sometimes hundreds of millions of years to form. Rainforests, coral reefs, and other ecosystems, which are being depleted at an astonishing rate as we speak, also take millions of years. We do not see new rainforests springing up overnight, nor even over hundreds of years. Those are thousand- and sometimes million-year processes.

Our population growth, however, is not. Recall from our Jim and Amy example that the further in time you travel from the node, or the initial decision to reproduce, the faster you go. I am sure you have heard of the parable of the grain of rice. An Indian farmer, who was good at math, asked the raja for a reward of a grain of rice, to be doubled for 30 days - so one grain on Day 1, two grains on Day 2, four grains on Day 3, and so on. On Days 1 through 5, the farmer received 1, 2, 4, 8, 16 grains of rice respectively. Not much, huh? But by Day 30, the farmer received 1,073,741,824 grains of rice. That’s over a billion grains of rice. With only 30 days of exponential growth.

Right now, we’re in the Days 28 to 30 of our time here on Earth. The human population jumped from 6 billion to 7 billion in only the past twenty years. And that takes into account enormous population control measures, like the one-child policy forced by the Chinese Communist Party in the early ’90s. After a certain point, unless drastic measures are taken to curb it, exponential growth spirals completely out of control, and the further it is away from zero, the faster it goes.

Obviously, there are huge economic, social, and political nuances here. Some countries, like Japan and Italy, have decreasing populations, and much of that has to do with those two countries’ relatively high rates of education. The more educated women are, the less likely they are to spend their years rearing children, when, alternatively, they could go to school. In countries like India, the population growth rate is still exponential because women have fewer opportunities, and, unlike China, India cannot force a one-child policy, because it is a democracy.

But is having more humans on the globe necessarily so bad?

Well, think about the last time you thought you had something to yourself, then realized you didn’t. It might be a cafe or a restaurant that you liked to frequent. It might be a band that you thought only you knew about, because you were cool.

Now, think about what made it worse. Other people, right? Too many people started cutting you in line for the morning joe. Too many college students started showing up at your restaurant, crowding you out of your seat. Too many people started liking your band, and you were priced out of the tickets.

Basically, other people ruin things. When there is a finite resource - like a cafe, a restaurant, or even a fanbase for a band - the more people who like and use it, the worse the quality of the experience becomes for each individual.

Think about so-called “tourist traps.” When you go to Venice for that authentic experience under the moonlit stars on a gondola, but you find that there are also 1,000 other people lined up for that moonlit experience, you end up not having the experience, right? Instead of a moonlit gondola alone with a romantic lover, rowed by a genuine Venetian, you are crowded on a commercial plasticky gondola with a loudspeaker blazing so all 1,000 people can hear. If 5 people wanted this experience, all 5 could have it. If 1,000 people wanted this experience, no one, except for the super rich who can afford to rent the entire river, ends up having it.

We are always talking about how everyone needs to have a greater slice of the pie. While that is true, many people miss the most obvious solution to a greater slice. When the pie is a finite amount, which it must be, the fewer people there are sharing the pie, then naturally, the greater each piece. Do you want to share your Thanksgiving pie with 5 people or 500?

This goes for our natural resources, too. We always talk about how everyone should cut their consumption. Let’s say there are 500 people, and each consumed 20 kW of power. That’s 10,000 kW of power being used. But let’s say there are now 5,000 people, and each person only uses 5 kW of power. There are now 25,000 kW of power being used, even though each person now uses a lot less. This explains why the U.S. has the same power consumption as China, even though the single carbon footprint of an American is maybe 500 times more. The people in the U.S. are using a crapload of electricity to take 2 showers a day, but the Chinese were cursed with the greater and poorer population.

Nnow think about what this 10 billion figure means.

10 billion is 3 billion more than 7 billion, and 3 billion is slightly less than half of 7 billion. So that represents almost a fifty percent increase in our carbon emissions in just thirty years.

That means almost a 50% reduction in the amount of resources available to everyone. Even if every single person on our globe right now cut back, went vegan, biked, shopped local – whatever – would it even matter? And how unrealistic it is to think that every single person would cut back! The amount of people who are vegan, bike, and shop local, is plainly pathetic: in developed countries in particular, less than 5% of humans.

We are doomed, because after a certain point, it doesn’t matter at all how much per capita consumption is reduced: with exponential growth in the population, the amount of carbon removed from the environment exceeds any remotely realistic measure of potential cutback performed by individual agents, even under the most insanely optimistic of circumstances. So even if you went totally vegan and without electricity, and literally NEVER participated in industrial society at all, it wouldn’t matter, because any time someone has a child – especially if they have over 2 children – that child will completely negate every effort you’ve ever made, and the effect becomes worse and worse over time, up until the environment’s carrying capacity – which by then will have been far exceeded.

I don’t want to spring a false hope when there isn’t one. But, if more people actually dared to open up overpopulation as a serious topic of discussion, maybe we would have something like a 1% chance of solving this problem. Right now, there is a taboo against addressing this, because it reads as an attack against children, mothers, or the concept of having children, and it carries extremely unpleasant reminders of horrible things, like Naziism and eugenics. But in this case, we are not talking about exterminating certain members of the population, or enacting widespread authoritarian practices. What I’m suggesting here is that for every entity on this earth, the environment cannot be sustained if things continue the way they have been.

In fact, the futures of all children regardless of class, race, gender, and nation of origin are compromised by our refusal to discuss this issue. Further, women’s educational and income equality and access to reproductive rights is a must in addressing it. Given the correlations between educational equality, right to abortion, and access to birth control, the only logical way to address overpopulation is to 1) actually recognize that it is a problem, and 2) give women the resources and opportunities they need to stop being forced to bear children when they have no choice but to do so. Because that, often, is the condition under which women rear more than two or three kids at a time.

On top of that, we as a society should distribute the burden of childrearing equally to both men and women, not just women. That means paid paternity leave, reproductive and health education, taxing children rather than giving government credits, and addressing all of the underlying sexism and socioeconomic circumstances which cause people to bear more than two children against their will. Supposing a family wanted more than two chilren, they should, of course, be allowed to do whatever they wished; but the consequences of that decision, for both parents, must be reflected in our tax codes and laws.

Dismissing this problem as one that discriminates against women, people who want children, or reproductive choice at large ignores the fact that all human rights – not just reproductive ones – will not exist in a world in which the climate has been destroyed. In situations of war, disease, and universal catastrophe, which is guaranteed during this coming period of mass extinction, there are guaranteed to be no human rights whatsoever. Is that the price we are willing to pay, because we didn’t want to offend some people today?

Being in denial of basic mathematics is even worse than being in denial of basic science. So, if you’re a serious environmentalist or just a decent human who wants all humans to maintain a basic standard of life, you can’t afford to ignore the calamity that would be inflicted upon all humanity, should an issue like this be ignored. Climate change cannot be stopped or even acceptably slowed, if population growth isn’t.

At least today’s actual children care about climate change more than older generations do. They know, at least, that denying a problem doesn’t make it go away, and is not at all an acceptable response for a society to have, when it runs into a problem. So maybe we didn’t make the wrong decisions to have these children, who know more than us.

But that’s where it stops. Spread the word, not your sperm.