I don’t think having kids needs to be expensive. At least in the UK, schools and healthcare are free. Food and clothing are cheap. Their addition to bills isn’t much in percentage terms. Toys are cheap.
The biggest expense is probably the time investment, but parenting is a different kind of “work” to the professional work that most EAs do, so I don’t think it necessarily comes from the same time budget (unless maybe the counterfactual is working 60+ hour weeks on EA).
Housing: this is kind of pretend, because we actually built two extra rooms onto our house, which had a high up-front cost but will be useful for years and will eventually make the house sell for more. I’m instead substituting the cost at which we currently rent our spare bedroom ($900/month times 2 bedrooms)
I think it’s unusual for people to rent out their spare rooms, and it’s good that you have done so and provided yourselves with more income/reduced your living costs. By that metric I imagine that many people (especially home owners) have higher housing costs than they think. Maybe EAs are more likely to think about this and maximise the efficiency of their housing. But at the limit, every loft, basement and garage not converted is counterfactual lost earnings. Or, indeed, you could say that real estate investment in general is profitable, and people should do more of it. But then so are other things. So any profits “left on the table” through suboptimally investing money are also potential “costs”… (and then here things get tricky, in determining what the optimal investments are. And we’re pretty much back to the foundation of EA! Optimal allocation of resources).
[As I’ve said elsewhere in this thread, I don’t think children are a special case of expensive. They are one of several things that can be expensive (see also: location, career choice, suboptimal investment, tastes, hobbies), and for most people, who aren’t already maximising their financial efficiency (frugality; investments), it’s a matter of prioritisation as to the relative expense of having them.]
I don’t know about elsewhere, but at least in the Bay the notion that people might have spare rooms they’ve just forgotten to consider renting out is downright funny.
I realise that. But I wouldn’t be surprised if the median household in the developed world had at least one spare room (this was one of the reasons why the “bedroom tax” was so unpopular in the UK).
Getting a place with extra rooms for your children doesn’t seem too cheap to me in percentage terms. A couple on their own can get away with one bedroom and more easily easily rent with roommates. With children, not only will they need more room, but they’ll probably be more selective of where they live (neighbourhood, who they live with if with roommates). At some point, it might be too inconvenient to not have a vehicle, which means the cost of the vehicle and the insurance, if you weren’t going to get a vehicle otherwise.
Raising kids may come out of your time spent sleeping or relaxing (risking burnout and lower productivity), reading (including EA stuff), EA community involvement, exercise. It could lead to value drift if you don’t maintain strong ties and commitments to the EA community, and unless you work in EA, these will be harder to maintain. If you’re a researcher, a lot of this extra stress and time spent will be during what would be your most productive years.
Re: location, rooms and vehicle—I guess it depends on how high your standards are (and could be net zero in % terms if you are willing and able to move to a cheaper location*). The median family in the developed world isn’t especially rich (£30k/yr household income in UK), yet has a decent standard of living by most measures, without most children being impoverished.
Re: time—I think raising kids can help with preventing burnout from intellectually demanding work (and also in this vein, guarding against value drift via burnout—i.e keeping EA from taking over your life entirely, to detrimental effect). Although yes, sleep/relaxation can take a hit in the early years.
*You can rent a 3 bedroom house with a garden in Manchester (UK’s 2nd largest/most productive city), for the cost of a double room in a shared house in London.
I agree that having a life outside of EA is good. I also know that a lot of people really want kids, and it wouldn’t surprise me if having kids made many more satisfied with their lives, some happier and some more productive.
If you’re willing to move to a 3-bedroom in Manchester for kids, why not do so without kids and get roommates to save costs instead? Or rent a smaller place in Manchester?
why not do so without kids and get roommates to save costs instead? Or rent a smaller place in Manchester?
Indeed. I would recommend that for anyone trying to be frugal so they can save/donate more (especially if they can work remotely). My point is, however, that unless you are already living a maximally frugal lifestyle, it’s possible to reduce your living costs in other areas such that having children needn’t be financially expensive. Children aren’t necessarily a special case of “expensive living costs”. It’s ultimately a matter of prioritisation.
Children are one of the largest financial costs and opportunity costs that the average person spends on, so they are one of the first things someone should not take for granted. Living somewhere significantly more expensive should be one, too, yes. Owning a vehicle is another. I think all three would need to be justified by their benefits (according to an impartial worldview), and whether or not they’re justified depends on the particulars.
I think it’s possible some people would be much less productive without children, because they’d be much less motivated. I think this is primarily how having kids would be justified, although we should be careful about motivated reasoning here, and in general with justifying expensive things we think we need to be more productive. Sometimes there are much cheaper solutions depending on your circumstances, e.g. grocery delivery and riding a bike instead of owning a car, or commuting to work (with a car or by public transit) from somewhere much cheaper.
If too few EAs have children, this might make us too weird and exclusive, and the children themselves might go on to do good, but, on the margin, it sounds like we have more cost-effective forms of outreach.
″… on the margin, it sounds like we have more cost-effective forms of outreach.”
Could you say more about what you have in mind?
(Asking because I personally don’t see any compelling alternative to a substantial fraction of EA folks raising children, especially when I consider a > 20-year time horizon.)
He basically agrees with Michael that having children and raising them as EAs is unlikely to be as cost-effective as spreading EA to existing adults. He also seems to feel somewhat uncomfortable about the idea of raising children as EAs.
I’m personally not sure, but this is what I hear from others in this thread and elsewhere. I’d be thinking the EA Community fund, university groups, running EA fellowships, GWWC, TLYCS, EA orgs to take volunteers/interns. Maybe we are close to saturation with the people who would be sympathetic to EA, and we just need to make more people at this point, but I don’t think this is the case, since there’s still room for more local groups.
I’ve been the primary organizer for the EA club at my university for a couple years, and I think a few of the members would not have been into EA at all or nearly as much without me (no one else would have run it if I didn’t when I did, after the previous presidents left the city), but maybe they would have found their way into EA eventually anyway, and there’s of course a risk of value drift. This is less work than raising a child (maybe 5-10 hours/week EDIT: or is that similar to raising a child or more? Once they’re in school, it might take less work?), has no financial cost, and I made close friends doing it. I think starting a local group where there isn’t one (or running an otherwise fairly inactive one) can get you at least one new fairly dedicated EA per year, but I’m not sure how many dedicated EA person-years that actually buys you.
How likely is the child of an EA to be an EA in the long run? And does it lead to value drift for the parents?
My pet peeve about this argument is that the Shakers lasted from 1770 to the present (although now with just two elderly members). That’s nothing to sneeze at for a utopian movement—compare them to the longevity of many 1960s communes that produced plenty of babies.
I think there’s a lot to admire about the Shakers… I’m just pointing out that as a social movement they are dying out, probably in part due to their views about sex & child-rearing.
Catholicism, Islam, and Mormonism seem to be much more durable in the long run (at least so far).
We can expect that we can “convert” people much more cheaply/effectively than they could. At current margins, it almost certainly costs far less to create EAs by “converting” existing people than “creating” new people and raising them in an EA household in hopes that they will later become EA. EA already has far more “adherents” than Sharkerism did at its peak. Also, neither celibacy nor childlessness is a “plank” of EA.
If I may abstract a bit from the Shakerism example...
I agree that we should be able to “convert” people more cheaply than other movements could in the past. But that doesn’t mean EAs relatively lower fecundity couldn’t pose some issues for the LR sustainability of the movement.
The question of “can we sustain the movement over time?” is whether 1. we can convert other peoples children more effectively than competing ideologies can convert ours and 2. that we can do so enough to make up for our relatively lower birthrates.
(Assuming we don’t find a third way involving beings that don’t die).
Maybe we convert our way to a stable transmission of values across generations, but I’m a bit skeptical since I’m having a hard time imagining a specific instance of a value system that made up for a lower birth rate by having a higher conversion factor. Catholicism? Since the priests / monks were prohibited from having children?
Okay, but if affiliation with EA correlates with a reproductive rate that’s far below replacement level, then if EA succeeds in converting everyone to EA, humanity will die out.
Think on the margin. Once the cost of conversion is high, transmitting the ideology (and humanity) by child-rearing makes more sense. In general, there are plenty of ways for me to promote population growth and the ideology that don’t require me reproducing.
Among other things, this assumes that we know how to transmit the ideology via child-rearing and that we know how to switch from one reproductive strategy to another en masse.
One study found that raising a child on average cost £10,822 per year in the UK 2014. I don’t know how they calculated this, however. It looks like they didn’t deduct child benefits from the cost, which one presumably should.
~1/3 of that cost is education at £74k, which I think is mostly unreasonable to include as it includes university (where the cost is mostly borne born by loans taken out by the student that are effectively a graduate tax; and arguably, given all the free material available online now, isn’t strictly necessary for a lot of careers apart from it’s signalling value) and school lunch, when they will eat regardless (although fair if they deducted this from the food budget, which seems quite reasonable).
Child care and babysitting is ~1/4. This could be much reduced with a parent working from home (so no before or after school clubs/childminding needed), and/or living with extended family and friends on hand.
I’ve done all these things, and the time still has to come from somewhere. Imagine a normal workday, and then imagine it while also getting snacks, resolving disputes, helping someone find their shoes, etc. Even while living with extended family and friends, we have never lived with someone who wanted to volunteer for this. We are just now getting to the point where it’s viable to do for two days a week with a 5- and 6-year-old while both parents work full-time from home. Even that much is pretty suboptimal for both parents and kids.
In my answer I was assuming that the children go to school (usually between 9am-3:30pm in the UK) and I’d guess Greg was assuming the same, therefore only having to cover 1-2 hours working while children are present each day.
Otherwise I agree, this is much harder if children don’t go to school!
Sure, there are multiple ways of reducing these costs. But the same could be said about consumption among people who don’t have children. So I’d say that raising children is relatively expensive compared with other forms of consumption.
Of course—I’m not suggesting otherwise. My point is just to say that you can cut other forms of spending as well, just as you can cut spending on raising a child.
Yes, it’s ultimately a matter of prioritisation. My point is that it doesn’t necessarily have to be expensive, so cost needn’t be the overriding factor in deciding whether to have children or not.
This could be much reduced with a parent working from home
I think the pandemic has shown this isn’t the case. As an example in my company everyone has been WFH since March 2020 and my colleagues who are parents have been working evenings and nights, and were the first to get furloughed (at their request) so they can take care of their small children.
It seems to me Greg was talking about school-age children where I think having a WFH parent will often be sufficient. I agree having a WFH parent for small children isn’t much help, as taking care of them is usually a full-time job on its own.
That said, most of the childcare cost in the UK does seem to come from the first few years (as it is a full-time job) and not from when children are school-age.
I don’t think having kids needs to be expensive. At least in the UK, schools and healthcare are free. Food and clothing are cheap. Their addition to bills isn’t much in percentage terms. Toys are cheap.
The biggest expense is probably the time investment, but parenting is a different kind of “work” to the professional work that most EAs do, so I don’t think it necessarily comes from the same time budget (unless maybe the counterfactual is working 60+ hour weeks on EA).
Childcare in the early years is a major expense. Housing is another major one (and one that doesn’t go away once they’re old enough to be in school). https://thewholesky.wordpress.com/2018/12/27/how-much-do-kids-cost-the-first-5-years/
Great to see the write up of expenditure!
I think it’s unusual for people to rent out their spare rooms, and it’s good that you have done so and provided yourselves with more income/reduced your living costs. By that metric I imagine that many people (especially home owners) have higher housing costs than they think. Maybe EAs are more likely to think about this and maximise the efficiency of their housing. But at the limit, every loft, basement and garage not converted is counterfactual lost earnings. Or, indeed, you could say that real estate investment in general is profitable, and people should do more of it. But then so are other things. So any profits “left on the table” through suboptimally investing money are also potential “costs”… (and then here things get tricky, in determining what the optimal investments are. And we’re pretty much back to the foundation of EA! Optimal allocation of resources).
[As I’ve said elsewhere in this thread, I don’t think children are a special case of expensive. They are one of several things that can be expensive (see also: location, career choice, suboptimal investment, tastes, hobbies), and for most people, who aren’t already maximising their financial efficiency (frugality; investments), it’s a matter of prioritisation as to the relative expense of having them.]
I don’t know about elsewhere, but at least in the Bay the notion that people might have spare rooms they’ve just forgotten to consider renting out is downright funny.
I realise that. But I wouldn’t be surprised if the median household in the developed world had at least one spare room (this was one of the reasons why the “bedroom tax” was so unpopular in the UK).
There’s actually a lot of underutilized real estate in the Bay Area, especially in East Bay, Marin, South Bay, and the Peninsula.
Much of it is locked up in big old houses that haven’t turned over in a long time though.
Getting a place with extra rooms for your children doesn’t seem too cheap to me in percentage terms. A couple on their own can get away with one bedroom and more easily easily rent with roommates. With children, not only will they need more room, but they’ll probably be more selective of where they live (neighbourhood, who they live with if with roommates). At some point, it might be too inconvenient to not have a vehicle, which means the cost of the vehicle and the insurance, if you weren’t going to get a vehicle otherwise.
Raising kids may come out of your time spent sleeping or relaxing (risking burnout and lower productivity), reading (including EA stuff), EA community involvement, exercise. It could lead to value drift if you don’t maintain strong ties and commitments to the EA community, and unless you work in EA, these will be harder to maintain. If you’re a researcher, a lot of this extra stress and time spent will be during what would be your most productive years.
Re: location, rooms and vehicle—I guess it depends on how high your standards are (and could be net zero in % terms if you are willing and able to move to a cheaper location*). The median family in the developed world isn’t especially rich (£30k/yr household income in UK), yet has a decent standard of living by most measures, without most children being impoverished.
Re: time—I think raising kids can help with preventing burnout from intellectually demanding work (and also in this vein, guarding against value drift via burnout—i.e keeping EA from taking over your life entirely, to detrimental effect). Although yes, sleep/relaxation can take a hit in the early years.
*You can rent a 3 bedroom house with a garden in Manchester (UK’s 2nd largest/most productive city), for the cost of a double room in a shared house in London.
I agree that having a life outside of EA is good. I also know that a lot of people really want kids, and it wouldn’t surprise me if having kids made many more satisfied with their lives, some happier and some more productive.
If you’re willing to move to a 3-bedroom in Manchester for kids, why not do so without kids and get roommates to save costs instead? Or rent a smaller place in Manchester?
Indeed. I would recommend that for anyone trying to be frugal so they can save/donate more (especially if they can work remotely). My point is, however, that unless you are already living a maximally frugal lifestyle, it’s possible to reduce your living costs in other areas such that having children needn’t be financially expensive. Children aren’t necessarily a special case of “expensive living costs”. It’s ultimately a matter of prioritisation.
Children are one of the largest financial costs and opportunity costs that the average person spends on, so they are one of the first things someone should not take for granted. Living somewhere significantly more expensive should be one, too, yes. Owning a vehicle is another. I think all three would need to be justified by their benefits (according to an impartial worldview), and whether or not they’re justified depends on the particulars.
I think it’s possible some people would be much less productive without children, because they’d be much less motivated. I think this is primarily how having kids would be justified, although we should be careful about motivated reasoning here, and in general with justifying expensive things we think we need to be more productive. Sometimes there are much cheaper solutions depending on your circumstances, e.g. grocery delivery and riding a bike instead of owning a car, or commuting to work (with a car or by public transit) from somewhere much cheaper.
If too few EAs have children, this might make us too weird and exclusive, and the children themselves might go on to do good, but, on the margin, it sounds like we have more cost-effective forms of outreach.
″… on the margin, it sounds like we have more cost-effective forms of outreach.”
Could you say more about what you have in mind?
(Asking because I personally don’t see any compelling alternative to a substantial fraction of EA folks raising children, especially when I consider a > 20-year time horizon.)
By the way, Toby Ord weighs in on this at 24:33 in his Global Reconnect interview.
He basically agrees with Michael that having children and raising them as EAs is unlikely to be as cost-effective as spreading EA to existing adults. He also seems to feel somewhat uncomfortable about the idea of raising children as EAs.
I’m personally not sure, but this is what I hear from others in this thread and elsewhere. I’d be thinking the EA Community fund, university groups, running EA fellowships, GWWC, TLYCS, EA orgs to take volunteers/interns. Maybe we are close to saturation with the people who would be sympathetic to EA, and we just need to make more people at this point, but I don’t think this is the case, since there’s still room for more local groups.
I’ve been the primary organizer for the EA club at my university for a couple years, and I think a few of the members would not have been into EA at all or nearly as much without me (no one else would have run it if I didn’t when I did, after the previous presidents left the city), but maybe they would have found their way into EA eventually anyway, and there’s of course a risk of value drift. This is less work than raising a child (maybe 5-10 hours/week EDIT: or is that similar to raising a child or more? Once they’re in school, it might take less work?), has no financial cost, and I made close friends doing it. I think starting a local group where there isn’t one (or running an otherwise fairly inactive one) can get you at least one new fairly dedicated EA per year, but I’m not sure how many dedicated EA person-years that actually buys you.
How likely is the child of an EA to be an EA in the long run? And does it lead to value drift for the parents?
If EA has the same plank as Shakerism, it probably doesn’t have a bright future...
My pet peeve about this argument is that the Shakers lasted from 1770 to the present (although now with just two elderly members). That’s nothing to sneeze at for a utopian movement—compare them to the longevity of many 1960s communes that produced plenty of babies.
I think there’s a lot to admire about the Shakers… I’m just pointing out that as a social movement they are dying out, probably in part due to their views about sex & child-rearing.
Catholicism, Islam, and Mormonism seem to be much more durable in the long run (at least so far).
We have much better communications technologies than the Shakers had.
I don’t follow how that’s relevant?
We can expect that we can “convert” people much more cheaply/effectively than they could. At current margins, it almost certainly costs far less to create EAs by “converting” existing people than “creating” new people and raising them in an EA household in hopes that they will later become EA. EA already has far more “adherents” than Sharkerism did at its peak. Also, neither celibacy nor childlessness is a “plank” of EA.
If I may abstract a bit from the Shakerism example...
I agree that we should be able to “convert” people more cheaply than other movements could in the past. But that doesn’t mean EAs relatively lower fecundity couldn’t pose some issues for the LR sustainability of the movement.
The question of “can we sustain the movement over time?” is whether 1. we can convert other peoples children more effectively than competing ideologies can convert ours and 2. that we can do so enough to make up for our relatively lower birthrates.
(Assuming we don’t find a third way involving beings that don’t die).
Maybe we convert our way to a stable transmission of values across generations, but I’m a bit skeptical since I’m having a hard time imagining a specific instance of a value system that made up for a lower birth rate by having a higher conversion factor. Catholicism? Since the priests / monks were prohibited from having children?
Big +1
Okay, but if affiliation with EA correlates with a reproductive rate that’s far below replacement level, then if EA succeeds in converting everyone to EA, humanity will die out.
Think on the margin. Once the cost of conversion is high, transmitting the ideology (and humanity) by child-rearing makes more sense. In general, there are plenty of ways for me to promote population growth and the ideology that don’t require me reproducing.
Among other things, this assumes that we know how to transmit the ideology via child-rearing and that we know how to switch from one reproductive strategy to another en masse.
Seem like pretty reasonable assumptions. If you thought that either was untrue, then this whole line of inquiry would seem self-defeating.
One study found that raising a child on average cost £10,822 per year in the UK 2014. I don’t know how they calculated this, however. It looks like they didn’t deduct child benefits from the cost, which one presumably should.
~1/3 of that cost is education at £74k, which I think is mostly unreasonable to include as it includes university (where the cost is mostly borne born by loans taken out by the student that are effectively a graduate tax; and arguably, given all the free material available online now, isn’t strictly necessary for a lot of careers apart from it’s signalling value) and school lunch, when they will eat regardless (although fair if they deducted this from the food budget, which seems quite reasonable).
Child care and babysitting is ~1/4. This could be much reduced with a parent working from home (so no before or after school clubs/childminding needed), and/or living with extended family and friends on hand.
I’ve done all these things, and the time still has to come from somewhere. Imagine a normal workday, and then imagine it while also getting snacks, resolving disputes, helping someone find their shoes, etc. Even while living with extended family and friends, we have never lived with someone who wanted to volunteer for this. We are just now getting to the point where it’s viable to do for two days a week with a 5- and 6-year-old while both parents work full-time from home. Even that much is pretty suboptimal for both parents and kids.
In my answer I was assuming that the children go to school (usually between 9am-3:30pm in the UK) and I’d guess Greg was assuming the same, therefore only having to cover 1-2 hours working while children are present each day.
Otherwise I agree, this is much harder if children don’t go to school!
Sure, there are multiple ways of reducing these costs. But the same could be said about consumption among people who don’t have children. So I’d say that raising children is relatively expensive compared with other forms of consumption.
There’s an important difference in kind here – raising children is a qualitatively different form of “consumption” than other kinds of consumption.
Of course—I’m not suggesting otherwise. My point is just to say that you can cut other forms of spending as well, just as you can cut spending on raising a child.
Yes, it’s ultimately a matter of prioritisation. My point is that it doesn’t necessarily have to be expensive, so cost needn’t be the overriding factor in deciding whether to have children or not.
I bet cost often gets used as an excuse here.
Hmmm… something about making the two commensurable feels weird to me… (not sure what it is about it yet).
I think the pandemic has shown this isn’t the case. As an example in my company everyone has been WFH since March 2020 and my colleagues who are parents have been working evenings and nights, and were the first to get furloughed (at their request) so they can take care of their small children.
It seems to me Greg was talking about school-age children where I think having a WFH parent will often be sufficient. I agree having a WFH parent for small children isn’t much help, as taking care of them is usually a full-time job on its own.
That said, most of the childcare cost in the UK does seem to come from the first few years (as it is a full-time job) and not from when children are school-age.