I keep thinking more about what I covered last month in my post Heritage Foundation promoting socialism, as usual. Charlie Kirk did too.
Many factors go into how many children people have. One of them is finance: can someone afford to raise kids. I think a lot of people think it’s not fair that it should be harder for people with less money to have kids. Oddly, people also react to me when I say that polluting and depleting save money and time that not having kids, somehow I can’t know what it’s like.
But I grew up expecting to have kids. Financial considerations factor heavily in my choice not to have kids so far. These people never offer me consolation or empathy for what they say is tragic in others. I think they dismiss my emotions and sacrifices, like it’s easy for me.
Their gross insensitivity to me reminds me of what the Trump supporter I spoke to after my Inc. piece in 2016, just after Trump’s first election: If You Voted for Trump, Let’s Meet. She lived in San Francisco and said people there who supported Trump got pilloried and attacked. She asked, “How could people who support inclusivity and compassion be so mean?”, or something like that.
In any case, people with less money tend to have more kids these days than people with money, Elon Musk notwithstanding.
As for Heritage and other conservatives, why don’t they see that while having kids is a bigger decision than most, the decision will still be based on market considerations? As I understand their views of markets, price signals tell people what they can afford or not and lead the market to adjust, perhaps to make having kids more affordable.
It may seem tempting to manipulate market signals if they want to make having kids more affordable, but I think their views of economics says they will exacerbate the problems they’re trying to solve. I think they criticize liberals and progressives, claiming they may want to help and may mean well, but that in the long run, they’ll grow the problems they want to solve.
Don’t they (conservatives and people who support limited government and free markets) say the best way to help people overall is to allow the market to allocate resources based on markets signals that haven’t been manipulated.
Don’t they also point to history showing that involving government where it doesn’t belong makes it difficult to impossible to extract it later, even if it does the job well?
Don’t they also point to history that in many cases, government involvement leads to increasing its coercive power, leading to a road to serfdom, as Friedrich Hayek put it?
Bottom line: are they shooting themselves in the foot, violating their own basic values?
If I’m missing something, let me know.
Thank you for your decision to not have kids. I think anyone who does not have kids should be hailed as a hero, even if it wasn’t their choice. You do some pretty extreme things to avoid burning fossil fuels, but none of them are more effective than not reproducing.
I do not think it’s fair that some people cannot afford to have kids while others can, and my solution is to make sure everyone has enough money to raise one or two kids. They can use this money for other things if they don’t want kids.
I appreciate the sentiment though feel odd about something I didn’t do. In any case, thank you.
Regarding “none of them are more effective than not reproducing,” there is one thing anyone can do that’s more effective than not reproducing, by a huge margin. That environmentalists avoid it is a big reason I have trouble with them.
By far the most effective relevant thing anyone can do is to learn to practice effective leadership skills. An effective leader can influence far more people than the number of kids anyone can avoid having. Most environmentalists lecture facts, tell people what to do, convince, coerce, and cajole, practices that tend to promote resistance and opposition. Leadership is about motivating and inspiring based on intrinsic motivation. It makes the work meaningful.
My book Sustainability Simplified covers sustainability leadership.
I can’t think of anything more important.