I think that there’s no essential difference between making someone in the future better off and changing who’s born in the future so that those who are born are better off. “Person A with good quality of life vs. Person A with poor quality of life” isn’t very different from ’Person A with good quality of life vs. Person B with poor quality of life”, because it shouldn’t matter whether the two lives are “different people” or not.
Given (1), causing a person with poor quality of life not to be born and independently causing a person with good quality of life to be born combine to give a very good outcome, so at least one of these changes should be very good, since the benefits of independent interventions should be additive. This doesn’t determine the benefit of any individual intervention, though. You could think that it’s not important for more good-quality-of-life people to be born and very important for fewer poor-quality-of-life people to be born, or the reverse, or something in between. I don’t think there’s very strong arguments for which one of those you should choose, but I would personally value future lives fairly highly.
“Pure” population interventions like increasing the availability of contraception or funding infertility treatments are not very cost-effective right now, compared to “indirect” interventions. Preventing fatal diseases increases population, while economic development decreases it, and both of these things have very good non-population effects as well. Your opinion on population ethics might affect your choice between the two, however. I personally favor health interventions since I value future lives relatively highly.
There should be more research on the costs of changing population size—currently, it’s hard to estimate how difficult it is to change population in location X by amount Y.
Effective altruists should think about population ethics more quantitatively. There are lots of statistics available about health, GDP, income inequality, population, etc., but I haven’t seen any discussion of tradeoffs between population and the other metrics (e.g. what % population change, either positive or negative, is required to compensate for a 5% reduction in per capita GDP or a 1 year decrease in life expectancy?). Even if you don’t care about the global population per se, the population size of individual countries is still important! If a country has life expectancy 10 years higher than average, adding one person to that country increases global life expectancy just as much as lengthening one person’s life by 10 years does.
Here’s my own opinions:
I think that there’s no essential difference between making someone in the future better off and changing who’s born in the future so that those who are born are better off. “Person A with good quality of life vs. Person A with poor quality of life” isn’t very different from ’Person A with good quality of life vs. Person B with poor quality of life”, because it shouldn’t matter whether the two lives are “different people” or not.
Given (1), causing a person with poor quality of life not to be born and independently causing a person with good quality of life to be born combine to give a very good outcome, so at least one of these changes should be very good, since the benefits of independent interventions should be additive. This doesn’t determine the benefit of any individual intervention, though. You could think that it’s not important for more good-quality-of-life people to be born and very important for fewer poor-quality-of-life people to be born, or the reverse, or something in between. I don’t think there’s very strong arguments for which one of those you should choose, but I would personally value future lives fairly highly.
“Pure” population interventions like increasing the availability of contraception or funding infertility treatments are not very cost-effective right now, compared to “indirect” interventions. Preventing fatal diseases increases population, while economic development decreases it, and both of these things have very good non-population effects as well. Your opinion on population ethics might affect your choice between the two, however. I personally favor health interventions since I value future lives relatively highly.
There should be more research on the costs of changing population size—currently, it’s hard to estimate how difficult it is to change population in location X by amount Y.
Effective altruists should think about population ethics more quantitatively. There are lots of statistics available about health, GDP, income inequality, population, etc., but I haven’t seen any discussion of tradeoffs between population and the other metrics (e.g. what % population change, either positive or negative, is required to compensate for a 5% reduction in per capita GDP or a 1 year decrease in life expectancy?). Even if you don’t care about the global population per se, the population size of individual countries is still important! If a country has life expectancy 10 years higher than average, adding one person to that country increases global life expectancy just as much as lengthening one person’s life by 10 years does.
I agree with these.
Is interesting. It’s the sort of thing that I think Robin Hanson or Tyler Cowen might have an opinion on, and one could easily ask them.