Make Babies, and Don’t Let the Greens Guilt Trip You about It

Make Babies, and Don’t Let the Greens Guilt Trip You about It | Foundation for Economic Education
"Several years back, the economist Bryan Caplan wrote a wonderful book called Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids.
Caplan argued that most parents underestimated the benefits of larger families and were engaging in costly parenting strategies that yielded few real benefits.
Thus, he said, if you love kids, you should have lots of them.
From NPR this week comes a story that might well be called “anti-Caplan” in every dimension.
It is a profile of bioethicist Travis Rieder and others like him who argue that it is immoral to have many children, if any at all, because of the burden that additional children place on the Earth’s ecosystem.
Given that we are already, Rieder claims, on the road to climate disaster, adding more children will both make matters worse and condemn those children to a horrible life on a worsening planet.
His argument might well be called “Altruistic Reasons to Have Fewer Kids.”
More specifically, he argues that children are what economists call negative externalities: 
“We as parents, we as family members, we get the good. And the world, the community, pays the cost.”
As it turns out, that claim is almost entirely wrong. 
It is parents who pay most of the costs of having children and the rest of us who reap the benefits..."